What a beautiful noise

A few days ago, I had to nip out after my evening class to pick something up at a late-night shop.

And as I walked back home through the streets, I heard something I've not heard in a long time: the murmur and chatter of people sitting outside bars, cafes and restaurants talking to each other.

Yes, they still have to comply with the social distancing rules, which meant that the tables were further apart than normal, there were fewer seats available and you had to show a negative coronavirus test that was no older than 24 hours, but people took that upon them and showed up. 

It's so nice to see some life back on the streets. 

You can sing along with Neil Diamond about the 'great orchestra of life' (as he puts it). The lyrics are in the subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2GUPnnMxIM

If you're too lazy to click on the link, here are the lyrics in full:

What a beautiful noise
Comin' up from the street
Got a beautiful sound
It's got a beautiful beat

It's a beautiful noise
Goin' on ev'rywhere
Like the clickety-clack
Of a train on a track
It's got rhythm to spare

It's a beautiful noise
And it's a sound that I love
And it fits me as well
As a hand in a glove
Yes it does, yes it does

What a beautiful noise
Comin' up from the park
It's the song of the kids
And it plays until dark

It's the song of the cars
On their furious flights
But there's even romance
In the way that they dance
To the beat of the lights

It's a beautiful noise
And it's a sound that I love
And it makes me feel good
Like a hand in a glove
Yes it does, yes it does
What a beautiful noise

It's a beautiful noise
Made of joy and of strife
Like a symphony played
By the passing parade
It's the music of life

It's a beautiful noise
And it's a sound that I love
And it makes me feel good
Just like a hand in a glove
Yes it does, yes it does

What a beautiful noise
Comin' into my room
And it's beggin' for me
Just to give it a tune

The sound of silence

Walking through the park after work today, I heard a strange noise: children laughing.

And it struck me that one of the things that has been most oppressive for me this pandemic year has been the silence.

Yes, some small children play in the playgrounds, but they don't make much noise. For most of the time, it's a matter of a child or two and a parent, playing in the sandpit. 

Even during the first lockdown, people getting some exercise by walking round the park would pass each other by, usually without even looking at each other, never mind greeting each other with a cheery "Guten Morgen". It was as though people were afraid to speak to each other, afraid of catching  'the plague' from each other. People didn't so much walk past each other as slink past each other furtively. Scared.

This afternoon, though, I peered through the trees and bushes to see where the strange noise of laughing children was coming from and saw, for the first time in over a year, pre-teen children clad in colourful team tabards running around outdoors on the sports ground, being coached by their trainer. The girl I saw - maybe 12 years of age with a long blonde pony tail - was positively beaming with delight. Her face shone with happiness.

I look forward to the time when life gets a bit noisier and livelier again.

Poor, poor geese

It's not often that I think about geese and they're not the most interesting of birds, but right now, I feel very sorry for the Canada geese in the park near my flat.

It's like this...A couple of weeks ago, I met the owner of Rocky, the French bulldog, out walking the dog in the very early morning. She mentioned that the geese in the park only seemed to have one gosling per pair, and I wondered if the pandemic had something to do with that. How, I don't know.

A week later, I was again on an early morning walk, this time through the park, and I got chatting to another dog owner (a big grey poodle this time) and I mentioned the paucity of goslings this year. "Ah," she said. "I can tell you why that is. An ornithologist told me that people had complained about the overwhelming number of geese in the park. So people went round all the Canada geese nests they could find and took out all the eggs bar one."

I find that pretty horrific. Yes, there were huge flocks of geese on the large grassy areas of the park, but if they can't find enough to eat, they'll go elsewhere.

Now, however, I see large groups of geese, tugging away at the grass, and barely a gosling in sight. 

On a walk in the park one Saturday afternoon, I heard a strange noise coming from a goose. As I passed the goose, I could see it was one of a pair and it had two goslings. (They couldn't find all the nests, apparently.) One gosling was fine; the other lay, incapacitated, on its back on the grass, its little chest still going up and down a bit. It was dying. And as the parent goose made its plaintive cry, all the other geese around the area were standing erect and very attentive. The moorhens, swans and ducks just went about their normal business, but not the geese.

This is why birds lay so many eggs. Their strategy is the same as that of Victorian parents: have 20 children and hope that two or three will live to see adulthood.

The breeding pair of swans in the park hatched seven cygnets this year and the last time I looked, they were down to five. "Water sickness" was the diagnosis of one woman (dogless!) whom I chatted with one evening. 

This, therefore, is why I feel so sorry for the poor, poor geese. Nearly all of the pairs have ended up with no gosling at all. It's breaking my heart to see them bereft of a little one to fuss over.

The more I think about it, the more I like my idea

 The debate about showing gender in the German language rages on unabated. Most Germans dislike the current options such as an asterisk in the middle of the word - try pronouncing that. 

My idea is this: make every word relating to a person (and maybe even animals) neuter: das or ein. No further endings needed

If Germans can say to each other "Liebling, wo ist unser Kind/unser Baby?" without screaming in horror because the word "Baby" or "Kind" doesn't actually give the gender of the child either way, then why not expand the use of 'das' to refer to male and female adults? (And if you can call a woman 'Liebling' without sticking an '-in' at the end of it...)

In English, the '-or' or '-er' ending to a noun based on a verb signifies "a person who/a thing that". Hence a teacher is "a person who teaches" A conductor (of an orchestra) is "a person who conducts". A hair dryer is "a thing that dries hair". A printer is "a thing that prints".

Without checking, I presume that the '-er' ending in German has the same meaning. Just like a "dishwasher" is "a thing that washes dishes", a "Geschirrspüler" (crockery rinser) is a "thing that rinses the crockery".

So in future, you call the baker "das Bäcker" and because it's neutral, it can be taken to mean a male or female baker. "Das Lehrer" would come to mean either a male or female teacher. Who can tell? Who needs to tell? We don't know in English what sex a "teacher" is. Does it matter? 

The more I think about it, the more I like my idea.

Made in England but made by Germany

 So far, I have managed to catch four episodes of "Inside the Factory", a series presented by Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey, three of them on YouTube. Forty-four episodes in six series (plus one special) are available in total.

I find the episodes fascinating as they provide "behind-the-scenes" insights into how some of the most famous products in the UK are actually made.

I've seen programmes from a sock factory, a cider-making company, the Cadbury Creme Egg factory and, over the weekend, a sausage factory.

All these products are made by famous British companies on British territory, but if you look carefully at the machinery used to actually make the items, you will see that they are mostly German. Take the example of the sock factory: the machinery that made the yarn was German; the machinery that knitted the socks was Italian; and the machinery that pressed the socks was Indian. How do I know? I just noticed the name on the machines and then googled. The sausage factory had machinery made by VEMAG. The cider producer also had German machinery as did the chocolate company.

How can it be that British factories rely so much on foreign machinery? How come so much of it is German? And how will Brexit affect the producers' ability to get hold of spare parts and repairs? Or new machinery for that matter? Brexit wasn't really thought out, was it?

______________________________________________________________________________

If you're interested in the programmes (and they really are interesting), you can find them on the BBC website:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r03q

If you are not in the UK, you will need to download the Beebs app, which costs EUR 40 a year and which gives you access the the programme archives of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. And you can switch on the subtitles!

is the weather "gay" or "muggy"?

A few days ago, I went for a walk around the park and soon felt sweaty. It was very "hot and humid" and I had difficulty remembering what the German word for it was. Was it "schwul" or "schwül"? Note that the different between the two words is one umlaut (the two dots above the u). 

Now, I knew one meant "hot and humid" (or "muggy") and the other meant "gay" (as in homosexual) and I wracked my brain to remember the mnemonic (Eselsbrücke) for the words.

And then it came to me: schwül macht müde. Muggy makes [you] tired. Both adjectives have an u with an umlaut in them.

German can be a minefield at times. Just two small dots can make such a difference in meaning.

Online shopping sucks...

 ...as the Americans would say.

It's an ugly phrase - to say that something 'sucks' - but there is no other way to put it.

A few weeks ago, I took off my watch while exercising and I've not been able to find it. And, believe me, I've looked everywhere.

Last week, therefore, I decided to buy a new one and went onto the site of the company that has been called "the evil empire", i.e. Amazon. I trawled through ladies watches with a leather strap as I was worried that a metal strap might be too large for me and, since we can't enter shops, I wouldn't be able to have it adjusted and it would fall off and I'd be back to square one, i.e. watchless.

The new watch arrived on Saturday and when I took it out of its box, I was shocked. My mouth fell open. It was so small and the strap so thin. Now that it's on my wrist, it looks utterly ludicrous: way too small for my arm. It might be all right for a small 12-year-old girl, but not for a grown woman. 

If only I could have seen it in real life. I would never have chosen it, but now I'm stuck with it. Online shopping sucks.

May - the loveliest month?

 On my early morning walks every day, I am able to marvel at all the lovely flowers currently in bloom. I think that May has the most different kinds of flower in one go.

The glory of the following are fading fast:

- honeysuckle (Geißblatt)
- forget-me-nots (Vergissmeinnicht)
- lilac (Flieder - even though there are white lilac trees, too)

The following can still be enjoyed in their full glory:

- bluebells (Hasenglöckchen). Currently there are large clumps and even swathes of them giving off their heady scent. And they are not only blue but also a delicate pink and white colour.
- rhododendrons
- azaleas
- hawthorn (Hagedorn). Probably my very favourite blossom - so small, so delicate, so ephemeral.
- irises (Schwertlilie). Most of them haven't yet opened up yet, but they are there.
- wisteria (Glyzine or Blauregen)
- dogwood (Hartriegel or Hornstrauch). This is a tree that has large, white flat flowers - four petals with a dark dot in the centre of the flower. Stunning and uplifting
- horse chesstnuts (Roßkastanie) - magnificent trees - this town has an abundance of old horse chestnuts, sadly under threat from the drought of the last four years
- buttercups (butterblume) - so pretty
- the humble daisy (Gänseblümchen). I have watched lots of people take photos of each other standing in front of large swathes of these small but cheerful flowers in the park.

Why not go for a stroll round your neighbourhood and see which of these flowers you can find?

Never a truer word..

I walked through the Altstadt on my early morning walk last Sunday and did some window shopping in a small shop there that sells, shall we say, quirky home accessories.

One of the signs in the window said this: Erstaunlich, dass Leute mit wenig Ahnung viel Meinung haben.

Or in English:  [It's] Astounding that people with little idea have a lot of opinion.

This puts me in mind of the Dunning-Kruger Effect that David G. reminded me of recently. This says that people with low ability for a task overestimate their ability. (You can look this up on Wikipedia.)

And a week or so ago, I heard this quote on a YouTube ad: "One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right but not enough to know you're wrong."

Yet another quote from YouTube, which is all over the web, too:  "In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." 

All these things are going through my mind because certain people in my life - three generations of them - have demonstrated very clearly  their lack of reading  and reasoning skills and yet are blaming me for their lack of understanding. Two of these people left school as soon as they could - which meant that they didn't even attempt one exam at the age of 16. The other was forced to stay at school until the age of 18 - because that is the law in the UK these days. But they all blamed me for any miscomprehension and not their lack of reading comprehension skills. 

They put me in mind of a lot of Daily Mail readers. When, for example, a recent article pointed out that continental Europe was suffering from drought and had done so for the last few years, a whole load of Daily Mail readers claimed that that was because there were too many people (i.e. Germany had let in too many asylum seekers and refugees) and too much industry and agriculture.

And I wondered if that was the problem with drought regions around the world, like the Sahara - too many people, too much industry and overfarming - rather than the correct definition of the word "drought", which is too little precipitation (rainfall or snowfall) in a given period of time.

As the saying goes, in an age of information, ignorance is a choice. 

I despair sometimes. The fact that people cannot use the Internet to check facts and definitions and to learn about the world around them in general just leaves me - to use another vulgar phrase - gobsmacked. 

Urlaubsreif

The German word "urlaubsreif" consists of the word "Urlaub" (holiday) and "reif" (ripe). I am "holiday ripe" or ready for a holiday. Or to put it more vulgarly, I'm "gagging for a holiday". 

And I am not only "holiday ripe", I am also "ripe for the island" or "reif für die Insel". I feel the need to be a bit like Robinson Crusoe: I need a break from everyday life. 

The problem with working from home is this: when you are here, you think, "Well, I might as well work. What else can I do?" Especially when you get e-mails asking if you can squeeze a text in anyway. You sit down for a short while to translate a text and before you know it, you've spent hours surfing the newspapers or - as modern parlance has it - doomscrolling.

In these strange times of coronavirus, no-one has been going anywhere much. And even 'staycations' are not alluring. Everything is shut right now. What are you going to do but work? 

I totted up the number of days I've had off  work since October 2019 and it comes to 12: one week in a spa town  up north in July, a week in another spa town down south in October, 1 day in a hotel in D'dorf just to see some different walls (all between lockdowns) and one day off last week - for a colonoscopy. Does that count as a day off? I'm still wondering.

All I know is that visions of previous holidays keep flashing into my mind while working, like some siren call. Will I ever even get to see the hills and forests of Wuppertal and Solingen again - never mind my beloved bay on Mallorca? The vaccination campaign seems to give us hope that some loosening of the rules might be possible by the end of summer. I hope so. Otherwise I'm going to go stir-crazy or, in other words, suffer from cabin fever.