ear Tessa, 
I was delighted to get your communication. 
Communication is a good word isn’t it? In this case, because it seemed very real. And all sorts of things came up, different angles. I used to do something like this with my friend Jan who went to Bangkok to teach for three years, and we used to send a tape once a fortnight to each other. So as to cope with the idea of sitting down and talking for 60 minutes, we had a sort of pattern; there would be personal, political and literary and on the reverse side of the tape there would be the continuation of a story that she was reading to me. This went on very faithfully for a long time.

There was considerable delay of course from receiving and sending to Bangkok even by air mail and so sometimes, the questions we asked, we’d have to wait a long time for an answer! But it was very delightful to go up the postbox and find that little package and no doubt she felt the same. 

She was living in a big block of buildings, she had a room with a balcony and that was it. It was next door to the huge establishment where she taught English to high school level children, although she hadn’t a word of Thai. I don’t know how well it worked Tessa, I think you could certainly get the small change of an exchange, shopping and making general inquiries about peoples well-being and health. That’s good - and to be familiar with the grammar and to be up to speed. Euh, not being up to speed to me is the real problem. I’d find that I never conquered that. When I was learning French, despite the fact that I did my masters in French, and I could read French as well as I could English. In fact I did the same course, I did English 3 and French 3 and in each one we started at the beginning. In English with Anglo Saxon and we worked out way up.  And in French we started with fragments of Gallo Roman and worked our way up, taking the phonetic approach for these languages. And that’s the pattern that I really enjoy. 

I like foreign times and foreign places and the further away they are, the better! Especially when it comes to the matter of the practice of philology and phonology and working out the past by comparative linguistics, that was my line. Now that’s a bit of an expression in brackets - I wanted to go on to say that I did enjoy the Mark Twain piece you sent. I had the same problem myself. Taking offense really of the fact that although I could stand the genders, I just couldn’t forgive them for retaining those case endings. I didn’t mind the doing of abstract words into ‘German’ German, through root words, so that the meaning of an abstract idea was more seriously, fundamentally, understandable I guess. With German, I thought it was an interesting choice that they deliberately made. Whereas of course, English just right from the beginning came straight from Latin through Norman French and so on and on and on didn’t hesitate to borrow any word at any time. Still doing it aren’t they! And it must be a pretty shapeless language to learn and the spelling is abominable. 
Oh, how refreshing it is learning Maori! All those vowels that are exactly the same as their phonetic values and the consonants too - except for a couple of funny ones that we don’t have in our language. The one that’s spelt ‘wh’ (pronounced not as an ‘f’) but as a mystery thing, which the Spanish have too, the thing’s very hard to say. It’s a bilabial fricative. Ah, a delightful language, (indistinct)xxxx indistinct) xxxxx, and all those things.

Now, I was thinking what a good idea it would be to go and live in Germany. I mean it’s not an idea is it? It’s an important decision. Susan’s friend Isabelle who she was in training college with (and their mothers were tramping companions way back), married a Frenchman and decided her children would grow up speaking nothing but French. She went to live in France and the children did grow up bilingually, and she is at present doing some lecturing part-time in the University of Nyon where she lives with a different man, teaching English. Now that would be a string to your bow wouldn’t it, if you lived in Germany. It always seems to be an alternative anywhere in the world! Everyone wants to get a hold of this universal language. 

I’m getting on quite well with my Maori I’ve talked to you about it before. Delightful habits of not having a verb ‘to have’ and a verb ‘to be’ and having some very strange ways of doing things. Always,(unlike German), putting the verb at the beginning. And, well, the subject can go somewhere or other but it’s all pretty sensible. They don’t have genders of course, and they don’t ever change the word - that’s almost true - they indicate the plural just by changing the article. You say, ‘Te Whare’ for house and ‘Nga Whare’ for houses. But one strange thing they have which I don’t know if it has any connection with the reason why way back in the Indo-Germanic faraway times, when that group of languages was developing, (not the Maori of course), is whether genders meant something. Because Maori has a change of letter in the possessive pronoun and adjective to indicate status! How’dyou like that? Not gender - status! I wonder if those far of Germanic genders have something to do with status. It would be nice if it were. You could have all sorts of speculations around that subject couldn’t you. 

Anyhow, I’m getting on with it. I do my lessons with my (reading) machine, of course it’s not possible to read anything continuously across because it only is a portion of a sentence, so you don’t know where a sentence is going! That’s hard. Though it helps to have the verb at the beginning. 

Now, let’s leave that and talk about literary things. Ah, that was a delightful story of Frank Sargesons’s, what a PERFECT story. It’s so wonderful to have an ending like that. I remember trying to write stories once and I usually had some cute little bit like ‘the Lord being ashamed of himself’ you know some really nice thing, and I would think, I’ve got the end first and I’d get a story and it would lead up the end. It didn’t work of course, you can’t be artificial about this literary business, it’s serious business. You don’t want to be boring, you don’t want to be facile, you don’t want to be another bit of the same. 

You obviously know all about this, and have been working on it with that story of yours, with which I had some difficulty. Because I had to listen to it more than once. I didn’t realise on the first listening, my hearing is like the other faculties in old age, in that its reaction time gets a lot slower and it’s hard for me to keep up with what’s being said at an ordinary speed. And when it hasn’t got an action thread, as it were, running through to help it along. It wasn’t until I ‘read’ it again, that I found that there was a help in the chapters, well, will we call them chapters? The numbering from 1 to 5? And then when I found where I was as we went along, that made a huge difference. If I’d had the text in front of me of course, I wouldn’t have had this problem. Er, for one thing, you have a longer bite at it. And so you’re really reading several lines at a time and getting an idea of what’s going to happen before it happens. The whole thing goes whirling along in your mind, and you’re not limited to one word at a time. (With audio) You don’t know what the next word will be and very often when I try to supply it, it’s the wrong word (laughs) and I go haring off in the wrong direction. 

Anyhow, you had the most wonderful images of places and the journey, as you went west. Oh, I delighted in it, I wanted to stop and (this was another thing) stop and read some of those phrases again! Because they, they really got to me. So, I did enjoy it, at the same time with feeling of frustration, oh, what a pity I couldn’t read it. The audio is a wonderful thing to have if you haven’t got eyes. It has its failings though, but it also has its virtues. Some of the English texts, generally speaking, are read by people who are trained actors or trained speakers of some sort. Particularly the actors they get to read these stories - they put into it so much more. The ones that are read by the foundation, the volunteers, the regulars from New Zealand don’t have that quality. And it does make a difference when you’re getting something only through the ears. 

Now I don’t dare stop talking because I’ve already had dreadful trouble with this machine. I’ve forgotten how to work it and every time I try to pause, I lost it, and then I found I wanted to go back to the beginning, and then play and when I got to the point where I left off I would start again. But somehow it didn’t work that way, I got all tangled up. So, I don’t share your delight in the new technical improvements. I hate them with a dreadful hate. It’s really a fact of life that people are getting left behind, left behind all the time. The time will come when you too will be left behind, as things go faster and faster and you get older and older. These silly technicians keep doing more and more, and more and more unreal and unnecessary things. Just from their selfish, perverted desire to fulfill themselves. Very bad idea that. Which is s’posed to be the thing that we’re all s’posed to be doing. ‘To fulfill’ ourselves. Nonsense! There’s nothing to fulfill! Until you’ve got something there. You can’t fulfill a thing that has no background and skeleton to fill up, no container as it were, no vehicle, no real mass to add to and change. This is some sort of a rave that I haven’t managed to express. Never mind! I dare not stop! If I do I’ll have to start again from the beginning. 

Now, what was I going to say? Oh yes, this terrible Don Brash! Who, as you know, for years and years and years, twenty years I think, used to be the governor of the Reserve Bank. Now, he was sort of chosen by the desperate National Party to come and be their leader. They absolutely ran out of anyone who is anyone. And so he came in, and he became their leader immediately, although he’d never been in politics before. He had stood, but he hadn’t been elected. But actually he came this time as part of the tail, you know those things, the voting system we have, where the number of party votes indicate the number of members that a party will have. It hands them right down, all sorts of weird combinations and alliances, coalitions are taking place. It’s really quite a chess game.

Anyhow, he gave a speech, knocking the Maori and the occasion of it was this big dispute about the ownership of the foreshore and seacoast which struck such a nerve with everyone. The Bill was introduced by the Labor Party to take all the foreshore to Crown Ownership, and of course the Maori were absolutely furious. The Treaty of Waitangi gave them their customary rights to the seas shore and they reckon they also have property rights and recently they have been preventing ordinary people from going to quite a number of beaches which they are using and living at. There are lots of these places as you can well imagine. Most off them are up in the Far North where people really do live and fish and live on the land and they always have. And the idea of that becoming public land to them has set their temperatures soaring, and so on. 

Anyhow, Don Brash has delivered a speech which also gained him much favor with many, many, many New Zealanders and National’s ratings shot right up! And, he said that far too much was being given to the Maori, they were being favoured by the Labor Party and ordinary Pakeha were being pushed aside, they let the Maori have the good jobs and they weren’t fit to perform them and so on. And it was a very logical, well-turned speech, and I was quite impressed by it just purely from the sentence structure and the logic of it. Ah, however, when he started to be interviewed on the radio, (of course, I listen to the radio all the time) he fell down. He wanted to do away with all the doles, the supports, of the unemployed. And when he was asked what he should do about it, because you can’t let people starve. He said, oh, no, we’ll create work. The unemployed will have to report at some place like the local county office and the work will be given to them they will be paid at which ever rate for the work. And that was his only idea of how to cope with the problem. More and more as he is attacked one finds that apart from when he’s reading a prepared speech, he’s sinking rapidly, thank God! (Laughs) 

The National Party in fact have sent him touring around the world because he’s really not doing much good to them now that every time he opens his mouth with an interviewer he exposes the fact that he really hasn’t thought his economics through to the point of having any novelty in it at all. It’s all very exciting, I’m really a political animal, it’s like sport. Of course that’s another thing that keeps us glued, not to the television (I don’t watch it, for a long time I couldn’t because I couldn’t bear the ads and now I can’t because I can’t see it!). I tried to have a look at one or two of the games, the Athens Games, but it was pretty blurry. It did interest me in a way, it’s funny the way everyone put down the Greeks and said oh, they’ll never be ready, and they were totally ready. Before I had my last, ah, downhill stretch with my eyes, my latest one I mean, they were rather wonderful, especially the rowing ones. Where you seemed to be on the edge of some artificial structure and in the background but not right up, there seemed to be a valley behind.

There were those bare hills with spots of what I knew would be just thorn bushes. We found when we were traveling in Greece that you can’t really get out of the car and look for a bush, if you need to answer the call of nature, everything is sharp and prickly, even the grass. And every little bush’s like a matakouri bush, they’re all prickly, prickly, prickly and only goats can handle them. You see them drawing their horizontal lines along those bare hillsides, and you hear the tinkling of their bells. 
Really, Greece has been totally destroyed by vegetarians. I’m rather anti-vegetarian. I reckon the human being is an omnivore. You’ve got carnivores and omnivores and herbivores. Herbivores are the ones that wreck the landscape, they’ve reduced it to desert so many places. I’m not saying that people are in that category of course, it’s just one of my defenses for the fact that I do eat dead animals. Well, better dead than alive. 
Now, Tessa, I don’t know where I am and I don’t know what I’ve already said, and it doesn’t really matter does it. I’m just communicating. I was wanting to say something about my favorite books. And one of the ones that I share with you, was this same Italo Calvino. What a lovely man! I’ve read some of his short stories and my favorite is a three part thing called ‘The Ancestors’ have you read it? It has the same quality as my other favorite writer, namely Salman Rushdie. There’s a sort of strangeness about it, they don’t worry about ordinary happenings, they just go happily along. 
Now, I do wonder whether this is recording at all,  because I didn’t dare stop and start again because I got myself into trouble when I did that. Anyhow, Tessa, I think I’ll just stop, eh? 

Bye. 

ear Readers, 


My grandmother’s tendency for pronouncements fueled by pure spirits (see post: The Wrong Language) is a trait shared by our Hausmeister here in Hamburg, Herr Klein. It is down to him that the shared areas of the building are kept clean. To this end he has devised a cleaning roster for the entrance way and stairs which he carefully rotates each week. The roster - which hangs prominently in the entrance hallway of our apartment building - is studiously ignored by at least 50% of the occupants. Herr Klein bemoans this lack of community spirit loudly and beligerently in the Treppenhaus whenever he, with bat-like accuracy, detects the scrape of a key in the front door lock.

Like most Hausmeisters, Herr Klein lives on the ground floor, a fact which makes escape from him rather difficult. He’s been living in the building since the year dot and says loudly and frequently to anyone who’ll listen; the only way they’ll get me out of here is feet first… his lease predates the rental market reform - he still pays what he paid in 1965. This modest sum is about 10 percent of what the apartment will be rented for when he is carried out feet first, when his penchant for clear spirits does finally gets the better of him.

Indeed, Herr Klein likes a post-breakfast tipple usually followed by a liquid lunch then an afternoon snifter before he moves onto a serious evening of TV while he snaffles the rest of his daily dosage. I often see him walking back from the bottlo at about 8am, chinking along carefully with several large bottles of schnapps. By midday he’ll be haunting the Treppenhaus, lying in wait for someone to pass by so he can regale them with tales of his late wife, ‘die Sizilianerin.'

Die Sizilianerin was, by his account, a volatile and passionate woman who frequently threatened to kill him, should he ever succumb to the charms of another woman. "Meine gestorbene Frau," he said to me one day as I edged past him in the Treppenhaus, "hat Mir immer gesagt, wenn Du fremdgehst, bring ich dich um!" The sense of this being if he ever so much as looked at another woman Frau Klein would have no hesitation in killing him, probably with her bare hands. 

However, despite his obvious potential fremdzugehen, he remained happily married to die Sizilianerin until her untimely death. I suppose it was her death that pushed him over the edge into the convicted dipsomaniac he now is, however, the fact that Herr Klein is permanently blotto in no way interferes with the orderliness of his life. A stickler for rules, he gets about in all weathers in a uniform consisting of a spotless white t-shirt, red braces, pressed jeans and if its raining a yellow raincoat and hat of the kind worn by Paddington Bear. I often wonder if his natty and slightly nautical sartorial bent isn’t a hangover from his days as a sailor. After the death of his first wife he spent many years at sea, wandering the globe from Amsterdam to Australia. 

Eventually however, he returned to exactly the same life he'd left behind - with one major alteration. In the Phillipines, Herr Klein found another potential candidate for the post of Frau Klein. Without further ado he quit his seafaring life and set about arranging the import of his exotic new bride.

The house gossip unfairly suggests that Frau Klein II was actually a mail-order bride, but I have it from the horses mouth that this is not so. On one of his trips to the ‘South Seas’ Herr Klein met Frau Klein II while she was working as a cook in a portside tavern of the kind only frequented by weeping Russian and stoic North German sailors. 

A native speaker of Tagalog, Frau Klein II also speaks excellent Spanish and English but unfortunately after twenty years in Germany, her command of Deutsch is still poor. I am sure she would concur with Mark Twain's thesis on learning German in his most well known phililogical lecture 'The horrors of the German Language.'  

This is a source of great chagrin to Herr Klein who complains to me that although she is a good cook, his wife cannot speak good German. ‘Even you speak much better German than she does.’ he says as we pass on the stairs. It’s tempting to be flattered but then it’s a question of relativity. I speak better German than an already muilti-lingual 65 year old woman with no need or desire to speak German. I shouldn’t let it go to my head, but I am weak.




Herr Klein, on account of his having had not one, but two, foreign wives is known amongst his contemporaries as a paragon of open-mindedness and a ‘friend of integration.’ The current government run by Angela Merkel, is very big on integration. It should be the one and only aim of all immigrants to integrate fully and by this it is meant - Learn to Speak Good German. This isn't just empty rhetoric and I myself am a graduate of the heavily subsidised state run 'integration course.'

 During this intensive course which ran for 6 months full time I managed to learn enough idiomatic German phrases to fool most people into thinking I can speak the language far better than I actually can. I do understand just about everything that I read or hear but the rub comes when called upon to describe either how something works or what it looks like. At this point I am often greeted with either an offer to switch to English whereupon my conversation partner will shame me with their excellent command of my puny language or by a slightly embarrassed head tilt which is German for, oh well, we’ll just let her go, she’s on a roll and trying so hard.




Most of the Germans that I encounter are of the opinion that one ought to stick to ones specialities and are mystified by any kind of let’s-just-give-it-a-go fervour for the unknown by the unskilled. This new world attitude just doesn’t compute. Antipodeans suffer terribly from instant-expertism and I - with my shaky command of German - am a case in point. But it's only when I buy into the myth that Herr Klein seems to want to construct around me as a peerless example of integration that I truly cross over into bullshitland. I have no more inclination to integrate than Frau Klein II but I just don't have it in me to correct him when Herr Klein goes off on a rave about my language skills compared to Frau Klein II's. Being as I am complicit, I am in no position to blame Herr Klein for his complete lack of understanding of his wife's plight, marooned as she is in a bubble of non-communication. I'm just glad when I manage to make a quick getaway without the spectre of the cleaning roster rearing it's ugly head.

Until next time,
Macht's Gut!

ear Readers, 

When I told my grandmother that I had met a German and was moving to Germany, without missing a beat, she replied: what a pity you couldn’t have met a French Man, German is such an ugly language.  At the time I was suitably outraged. I now understand her comment in the light of her own position as an avowed Francophile. 

As one of the early female graduates of (the now) Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, she studied French language and literature. Way back when, the study of a foreign language consisted mostly of comprehension tasks including reading, writing essays and dictations. One could also hope to pick up a further smattering of what my grandmother called daughter languages; of Latin, naturally, the mother of them all. The offspring in this case being Italian and Spanish. 

At that time, in New Zealand, the study of languages was considered an academic pursuit with little or no application in the real world - apart from a career as a teacher. However baffling that sounds today, there is a kind of logic to it. Unless a field trip to nearby Tahiti was on the cards, it was of course a dim possibility in that far flung outpost of the British Empire that one would ever need any language other than English. 

Much later, with the rise of cheap air travel, a trip to see 'The World' (read: the UK & continental Europe) became a rite of passage for young New Zealanders. Dubbed the OE (Overseas Experience), it consisted mostly of drinking too much and throwing up in a gutter in Charing Cross, followed by sleeping on a mates sofa in a squat in Earls Court. But that was much, much later and I digress. 

In my grandmother's day it was strictly English all the way. The language of the 'mother country' served a twofold purpose. Firstly, as a social glue amongst newly established populations from different language backgrounds. A second and less acknowledged outcome was the socially engineered decline of the Maori language. Spoken by 100% of the indigenous population at first contact, today Maori is spoken by just 3.7% of the population. 

Eroded by such policies as The Native Schools Act of 1867, the speaking of Maori was banned not only in the classroom but crucially, in school playgrounds. The resultant language loss is a good example of how seemingly benign policy - we want to help 'our' indigenous population to succeed in the wider world - can go so horribly wrong. However, in an encouraging sign, according to 2013 census data, and thanks to the brilliant grass roots Te Kohanga Reo movement, today in New Zealand younger people are more likely to speak Te Reo than older people.

To return to the topic at hand: my Francophile grandmother lived to the age of 99 and at this great age she was entirely accustomed to making statements of a greater or lesser degree of outrageousness. At any given family gathering, installed on a comfy chair with a good peg of single malt, she handed down pearls of wisdom to her multitudes of descendants from her matriarchal seat. One such pearl was her comment about the wrong language. And the reason that her comment cut to the quick, was that (at that time) I shared her love of All Things French.

Since early childhood I had nursed a burning desire to actually be a French nun. The fact that I didn't meet any of the pre-requisites, such as being French or being acquainted with any religious doctrine, was of no concern to me. At the age of six I regularly paraded through the house with the cloth bound version of the Concise Oxford French Dictionary as my song book. I sang along cheerily to our LP of  The Singing Nun. Soeur Sourire was actually Belgian but at this age I made no distinction - I happily subscribed to the bliss of ignorance. 

Feeling myself to be somehow French by association or osmosis, I pretended that I could understand French and regularly told people that my grandmother was French. Much later, when it became de rigueur to hate the French for blowing up the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, I was forced to reassess this position in the light of the French governments truly abysmal handling of the whole sorry affair. But that's worthy of a whole 'nother post...

Now that I live in Germany and do battle with the wrong language every day, I regard my earlier self with a satisfying degree of Schadenfreude. It serves me damn well right, I say to myself, that I regularly break my tongue in my second language. If only I had stuck with learning German in school instead of changing to French. In typically fickle fashion I changed languages after one week of German instruction. Partially because of my instinctive rejection of a language which forced me to listen until the end of a sentence to get the full meaning o what was being said. And partially because the French teacher, Madame B, was French and actually wore a beret. This last fact pleased my grandmother no end, may she rest in peace.

Until next time,
Macht's Gut!

ear Readers,

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything so compelling and mysterious as The Wind up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. In print since 1994, and available in English since 1997, I have to admit ignorance of this brilliant writer until I chanced across this volume on the English Shelves in my local Bücherhalle in Hamburg, Eimsbüttel. 

The library itself is in a community centre called the Eimsbüttler Haus. The centre is comprised of a complex of low-slung Modernist buildings of concrete slab construction. Automatic entrance doors open onto a vestibule with highly polished grey linoleum floor: this entrance space is dominated by the main notice board to which the current course program is pinned. The course list on the notice board affords a snapshot of the local community, alongside activities for the elderly and less mobile it is dominated by such offerings as Yoga für stillenden Müttern (yoga for breastfeeding mothers) and offene Treffpunkt für werdende Vätern (meet up for prospective papas). 

The German birth rate (at 1.36%) is one of the lowest in the European Union but judging by the courses on offer, the Eimsbüttlers are doing their bit to buck the trend. Indeed, with its mix of lefty and conservative voters (31.2 % of Eimsbüttlers voted for Frau Merkel's Christian Democratic Union next to the Green’s 26.1 % in the 2009 election). The kindergarten and playgroup waiting lists are long, and the sidewalk cafes on the high street are filled with designer Daddies enjoying their parental leave, Freitag courier bags bags stuffed with organic spelt crackers and containers of homemade sweet potato puree. 

Back at Eimsbüttler Haus, the adjoining café offers what is probably the cheapest snack in town, at least in this suburb. For eighty cents you can enjoy a slice and add a cup of tea to that and you’re getting away with around two euros, including tip. Despite the value for money factor, this café is so consistently poorly patronised that I can always be sure of a quiet seat as I steal a moment on a Saturday morning to browse the latest yield from the English Shelves. 

With the constant ebb and flow of borrowing and returning, the contents of the English Shelves, like the magic porridge pot, are refreshed on a regular basis. Because of this element of chance, I have discovered and enjoyed books that I would probably never have bought. These pleasing reads I enjoy doubly for the quality of impermanence that they bring to my life. I don’t have to find a home for them on my already overloaded bookshelves or stack them guiltily in the to-be-read-one-day pile n my bedside table. Moreover, if I do happen to take a chance on something of dubious literary merit then I don’t have to shove it behind my complete set of Grantas when I’ve got company, I just return it when I’m done. Being a library regular has made me more adventurous as a reader, and it was in this spirit of discovery that I stumbled over Murakami’s work.

The Wind up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on the nature of being and how inner and outer worlds collide and converge. It suavely deals with the mystical and the mundane all at once. I can only speculate how closely the English mirrors the original Japanese, but the tone of the text is so smooth and meticulously crafted that I didn’t feel any disadvantage for reading a translation. The act of reading this book, was probably made more mysterious or at least a bit more atmospheric by the fact that I read some of it by candle and torchlight, (well ok, by bike-lamp), as I waited for my much missed Leselicht replacement to be delivered to my local bookshop. 

The 'Leselicht' reading lamp is a neat little black number that clips into your book and when switched on creates a discreet cone of halogen light to read by. It had become my constant readerly companion since I bought it from my local bookshop on Osterstrasse. A few weeks later and at a crucial point of narrative intrigue in The Wind up Bird Chronicle, it gave up the ghost.  Of course the option was there to simply turn on the big light and keep reading. But being so cosily ensconced in my reading cone, I was loathe to flood the room with 100 watts of incandescent light. Rummaging around for a torch and finding only a bike lamp, I decided to augment that with candlelight and read on. After half an hour my eyes were feeling so grainy that I had to put Mr. Murakami to one side and admit temporary defeat.

And so, it was in a determined frame of mind that I presented the defunct Leselicht to Frau Verkäuferin at the information counter of my local bookshop on Osterstrasse. The lady in question was studiously avoiding eye contact with any customers, being as she was, deeply engrossed in checking a pile of paper work against her screen. I stood and waited for her to look up and politely ask me, with just a hint of a smile, how she could help. Such was my socialisation that it still takes me a few seconds of standing and waiting until I remember that not only will she not look up of her own accord, smile and ask me how she can help, she’d be totally within her own parameters of correct behaviour to carry on with her paper work. And so with a short Entschuldigung Sie, bitte, I launched into what I hoped was a relatively understandable tale of being unable to read my book to its conclusion (on a snowy winters night with the wind howling outside) because of the sad demise of the Leselicht. She stared at me with a slight frown as I spoke. Recognising this look as the I’m-not-making-sense-in-German look, I reiterated my basic message. 

Mein Leselicht, I explained, ist Kaput, and waved the offending article at her. 

She took the Leselicht and after examining the receipt closely she looked over to the shelf where the Leselicht had been and after a moments reflection pronounced, die gibt’s nicht mehr, with a finality that indicated the end of the matter, or at least her interest in it. With that she returned to her screen and papers. 

When I first moved to Germany I was flummoxed by exchanges such as this, but these days I am prepared and had already rehearsed what I would say in the face of exactly such a situation. I took a deep breath and waded into the swamp of insecurity that is negotiating a good outcome with my average German skills.

Hmmm, I said thoughtfully, is it then possible to you to please order this lights. She looked at me with genuine surprise, no, she said, of course we don’t order them one at a time. I had expected something like this and not to be put off I smiled at her engagingly and said, achsooo … then can you ordering a batch, please? No, she said, we don’t do that until all of our shops in Germany have finished their stock. Ah, I replied, fishing around frantically for the correct conjunctive, then would it possibility be for you to be ringing the other shops, and to check them all if they are having the same something? She raised an eyebrow skeptically and replied, do you know how many shops we have? I knew this was a trick question so I smiled at her, waiting for the answer. In Germany we have twenty three affiliated shops, and, she went on, warming to her theme, all of the shops have different opening hours! It’s going to take a very long time to contact them all. I nodded sympathetically to show I had grasped the magnitude of the task ahead of her and replied, yes, this I understand, and managing to stay on message I reiterated, but I would like very much for me to have a replaced lamp.

 I think it’s better, she replied, when we give you your money back. 

At this point, I would have normally thrown in the towel but the thought of returning home empty-handed after so much psychological effort was unthinkable. And so, spurred on by bad-service-rage I looked Frau Verkaeuferin in the eye saying, I wanting my lamp, and I waiting so long as it is for a new one, so how long is that please will be? That is not possible to know, she replied enigmatically, turning back to her paperwork. Go now to the front desk where you can leave your details and we will call you. At that moment it dawned on me that I had prevailed, kind of, so I thought to push my point home once more by asking, can you please be giving me like an idea of when that might to be? She looked at me and said very slowly as if to a child, when the lamp is there.

I had mixed feelings as I walked home through slushy streets. I was without a replacement Leselicht but had the tantalising promise of a new lamp in sight. Like King Pyrrhus of Epirus, I had sustained egregious injuries, mostly to my pride and yet I felt strangely elated and, it must be said, victorious. I resolved to muddle on with my bike-lamp and candlelight arrangement and to keep my visits to the English Shelves up, despite the temporary set back. 

And so, on a Saturday morning several weeks later I was browsing those very shelves when my telephone rang. Frau Verkaeuferin was on the line, yes, we have your light, yes, you can pick it up today. I picked up the book I’d been wistfully imagining reading by Leselicht and took it to the self-service issues desk. I swiped my card and laid Jane Austen’s Persuasion triumphantly on the sensor table. 

"Victory," I whispered to the computer screen, "is sweet." I slid the book into my bag and hurried out of the Eimsbuettler Haus in the direction of Osterstrasse to claim my spoils.

Until next time,
Macht's Gut!