The Germans have a word for it: Kurschatten

The word-for-word translation of Kurschatten is "spa shadow", i.e. someone who follows you around - or "shadows you" - at a spa resort. This is a man or woman you have a little love affair - or as the Germans would put it a Techtelmechtel - with while staying at a spa resort. Since stays can be up to 6 weeks long, that's plenty of time for something romantic or flirty to develop. 

Normally, things don't go any further than the spa resort. What happens in Baden Baden stays in Baden Baden.

In the past, going on a "cure" was very popular in Germany. My civil servant aunts in Berlin went every four years for a 6-week Kur or "cure" ever four years, whether they needed one or not. A "cure" is meant to prevent any disease or condition from developing. Later, there was a medical reform in order to save money and this rhythm was then changed to four weeks every six years. I'm not sure what the current situation is.

Even now, though, if you are an employee and have national health insurance, you'll often get prescribed "Reha" or Rehabilitation, i.e. physiotherapy and that is very much like a Kur. For example, if you get a new hip, you'll spend 6 weeks in a "Rehaklinik", which is where you could develop a little fling with someone for the duration. 

Six weeks of physiotherapy in a clinic after hip surgery - totally unheard of in the UK. The mother of a colleague of mine had a hip replacement somewhere in the north of England and was back at home two days later. She was given a list of exercises to do and a nurse came by twice a week to check on her progress.

Imagine, though, six weeks and the chance of a bit of hanky panky or Techtelmechtel to boot [noch dazu]! I should think a lot of Brits would love that. And all on the National Health Service! What's not to like?

The Germans have a word for it: Kummerspeck

Sometimes, the Germans come up with a word you never knew you needed. "Kummerspeck" or, literally, "heartache bacon" is the weight you put on when you are feeling down after, say, breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend or losing a job. Basically, it's the result of "comfort eating". 

Whenever my mother visited her family in Berlin, she used to buy Speck, which is a thick, subcutaneous layer of fat from the back of the pig. There are two types: one with bits of meat in it, and one that is pure white fat. Like this:

My mother always opted for the all-fat version, wrapped in plastic, sometimes taking two of them back with her in her luggage, just in case she didn't go back to Berlin for a while. 

And what did she do with it? She'd cut off some slices, dice the Speck finely and then fry the small cubes in a pan and use them to flavour mashed potatoes or red cabbage. As the British would agree, bacon makes everything taste better. Even Brussels sprouts [Rosenkohl].

The weird thing is that, although I hate fat and will cut even the smallest amount of it off meat, I adored eating this white Speck. Go figure, as the Americans would say. Or, in German, "Wahnsinn, oder?"

Hence, if Speck is the layer of fat on their backs that the Germans encourage their pigs to grow, then Kummerspeck is the layer of fat heartbroken, depressed or melancholic people gain when they eat, eat, eat to suppress their sadness.

I might not know why the caged bird sings, but I know why Karstadt is going out of business

When I was a little girl visiting my grandparents in Berlin, I often trailed my relatives around vast emporia known as "department stores". They were myriad: Karstadt, Wertheim, Hertie... When you went into them, you felt as though you were walking into Ali Baba's cave: they were crammed full of delights, lots of them glittering and sparkling. You name it, you could find it in one of these places. They were packed with people.

Many branches of Wertheim were either closed or converted to Karstadt. Hertie was also taken over by Karstadt in 1994. In the German town where I now live, they used to have Kaufhof, which itself gradually took over Horten, the fourth largest German department store chain at the time. But even Kaufhof, established in 1879, was merged with Karstadt in 2020 to form Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof. 

Now... although Galeria is still the third largest chain of department stores in Europe (after El Corte Ingles in Spain and Marks & Spencer in the UK), on 2 October 2026 the company filed for insolvency proceedings for the FOURTH (!) time in seven years. As some people have commented to me, the company keeps getting bailed out by means of taxpayers' money. And that's despite the fact that since 2020, 47 branches have been closed down. They just can't seem to make a go of it [etwas zu einem Erfolg machen].

And why is the company struggling so much? Well, yes, it is convenient to order stuff from the comfort of your own sofa. But it's harder to compare stuff online; it's much easier to go to a shop, place things side by side and then compare them. And the colour on the screen might look very different in daylight. And you can't feel the fabric. Many's the time I have been attracted to some item of clothing in a shop and when I went over and touched it, I recoiled [zurückweichen]. It felt too synthetic - or looked too cheap. Finally, you can't try it on until it arrives through the post and then if it's not the right size, then there's the hassle of returning it. No thank you.

Last week, I went to Karstadt's haberdashery [Kurzwaren] department - my favourite bit of the shop. What was once a magnificent section of the store now looks a shadow of its former self. About half the variety of bales of cloth [Stoffballen] for one thing. Large gaps where tables used to be. I had a list of things I needed, I got only one. 

And embroidery threads? For years and years, I've been going there to "feed" my cross-stitching habit. I've been buying Anchor embroidery floss since they were priced at 75 cents each. They now cost €1.75. Karstadt had the whole array of colours - over 300 of them. 

Not any more though. "Oh, no, we now only offer Rico embroidery thread." Who on earth wants that? They might be cheaper, but the colour range is much smaller and the quality is lower. The end result of your embroidery has no sheen [Schimmer]. And all my patterns specify either Anchor or DMC - for which I have a conversion chart.

While I was there, trying to track down ribbons (also on my list), another woman came in and asked for heading tape to make curtains (that's the strip that goes at the top and which you can pull together to make pleats and where the curtain hooks go into). "We don't stock that." Off she went, muttering under her breath - something about taxpayers' money going to waste.

But she's right. It is frustrating. You go to an actual bricks-and-mortar shop - rather than shopping online - only to be told that they don't offer that any more. 

Over the years, Karstadt has dwindled. No longer a "box of delights", selling goods that ranged in price from cheap to expensive via "reasonable", it has closed the following departments:

- pet and gardening equipment

- photography

- printers

- picture framing

- curtains (ready-made and material)

- books

- lighting

That's all I can think of at the moment...

The less one offers, the less reason people have to come to you.

And that's why Galeria Karstadt is in trouble... yet again.

Multiple-choice walks

When I leave this building, turn left and walk for around 100 metres, I find myself in a huge park, all 70 hectares or 700,000 square metres of it. It's so big that it contains a cemetery - which has the feel of a park, it is so beautifully maintained - and the German versions of allotment gardens, Schrebergärten. 

The park consists of various areas that were then melded together: a park that was first opened in the late 19th century, a plot of wasteland, along with the allotments and the cemetery and some fallow land [Brachland]. Anyway, in the late 80s, they were all redesigned so that you can walk around all those areas freely. The result was 22 km of pathways. 

When I go for a walk there - and I can easily do 5 km just walking round the park once - I have a usual route that takes me past all my favourite parts, such as the water features and the dahlias in late summer. However, just for fun, I sometimes decide to mix things up a bit and go down paths I've never been down before. In fact, I believe I could walk in that park every day for the rest of my life and create a new variation every time. I really do. It's lovely when you have so much choice right on your doorstep.

Sorry, what did you just call me?

I was supposed to be called Christopher. That was the name that my parents had chosen for me, but when I was born, I turned out to be female. Christine was not possible, as my 11-month older cousin already bore that name. Hence, for four days, I was called "it" as in "Wie sollen wir es (das Baby) nennen?" It had to be a name that the Welsh and German relatives could pronounce with ease and without too much distortion. (For example, the names Jonathan and Ruth sound nice in English but not so in German.)

In the end, it was my German aunt who suggested Martina and, although my parents had bought a book of girls names and had even looked up the meaning of that name ("of Mars and warklike), they went ahead with it.

In Wales, the name is unusual. Well, in Britain really. After all, it is said to be more of a Catholic name: there is a Saint Martina, whose saint day is 30 January. But at least the short form, Tina, sounds okay. Unlike the long form when said with a slight Liverpudlian twang - and there were a few people in my area of Wales from Liverpool. 

But, oh, it seems to be so hard for people to remember my name. Especially over here in Germany where I have been called all sorts of names. It seems that people see me and think "something beginning with M". That means I've been called all of the following at least once: Martine, Marina, Maria, Marita, Martha, Margaret, Moira, Mary, Marianna, Marion etc. etc. 

I've even been called Bettina and Susan. Why Susan? Well, the person who called me by that name said, "Well, I know that that person over there with the same surname as you is called Susan, so I thought maybe every woman with that surname is called Susan." What logic!

But in the last month, I've had two new variations: firstly, someone printed my name on a certificate of attendance as Martin. So all of a sudden, I was male. And an e-mail from Telekom addressed me as Emma. 

I despair. 

After the most famous Martina of all - Navratilova - you'd have thought that people could cope with the name, but it seems not.

My latest acronym: OHIO

Of all the people in my family - on both the Welsh and German sides - I am the untidiest. Not dirty, just untidy. Oh, I can get everything looking just perfect, especially when I've got someone coming to stay with me, but with no-one in the flat, I can turn around and half an hour later, everything untidy again. 

I often find that as soon as I've put everything away - a place for everything and everything in its place, as they say - then it only takes 30 minutes for me to start pulling everything out of the drawers again: scissors, pens, needles, crochet hooks, books, papers..... Why do I bother?

And, of course, when it comes to day-to-day household chores, I can always find something more interesting to do, such as reading or "making things". And until the latest handicraft project is finished, the place gets covered in threads and bits of fluff and polyester stuffing and, recently, plastic pellets to create a bit of weight in my frog bean bags. Boy, did the vacuum cleaner rattle when those plastic pellets went into it.

Often, I just can't be bothered tidying up and I'll put something down somewhere to "put away later". However, I have recently stumbled across a new acronym (i.e. an abbreviation that can be said like a word, such as NATO) which is meant to help people keep a neat and tidy home: OHIO, which stands for "Only Handle It Once").

For example, if you have a book in your hand, put it back on the shelf straight away instead of putting it on some pile to sort out "later". Why do that? It only means you have to pick it up again some other time. If you have a pullover in your hand that you only wore for an hour or so, don't drape it over a chair, fold it up and put it away now. If there is an e-mail that asks you to send the writer something, then do it at once and you won't have to put it on a to-do list or keep it in your mind all day, or even for the next few days. When you unload your groceries from the shopping bags, put them away as you take them out of the bags. Don't just let them lie around on the kitchen counter until "later".

This way, to-do lists become shorter and you become a bit calmer because you don't have to remind yourself all the time what you still have to do. 

As Nike's slogan says: Just do it!

The Germans have a word for it: Holschuld and Bringschuld

It's been quite a while since I stumbled over these words in a text that I was translating. From a legal perspective, it relates to money or "debt", i.e. Schuld. Holschuld in that context means "debt collectible by the creditor, or debt to be collected at the debtor's residence". And Bringschuld means "debt to be discharged at the creditor's domicile".

But the translation wasn't referring to money at all but to information and in this case, Holschuld (literally: "fetch obligation") means that you have to actively gather (or "fetch") the information you need to do a particular job, e.g. from colleagues or superiors. It's down to you to seek out the data.

Thus, conversely, Bringschuld ("bring obligation") describes the idea that you automatically receive the information required to do a particular job, i.e. you don't have to go in search of it or to ask for it. It should be sent to you as a matter of form.

You can tell that these terms are a very German concept by searching for them on Wikipedia. They are there, but only in German and not in any other language. That's because they are unique to the German way of thinking. In no other country has anyone else thought it necessary to invent a word to describe such concepts. 

Here's a nice little thought to end with. The quote in the picture loosely translates as "Knowledge is not something that is owed to you. Knowledge is something you must seek out yourself".