A welcome pain in the neck - for once

This year has been a very slow year workwise. If I've not been twiddling my thumbs, I've been crocheting hats and scarves and sewing and stuffing small teddy bears for a children's charity headquartered in Berlin. And doing a bit of studying. I've even re-joined my old gym and attempt (note the word) to go there two or three times a week.

All that, however, really fails to fill in all my waking hours and I have found myself simply bored out of my skull for most of the time.

Fortunately, things changed drastically on Monday, when a colleague in Cologne e-mailed me to ask whether I fancied taking some work off her hands. Did I? Of course, I did! So 25 pages about alarm systems winged their way over to me across the ether. Along with files and files of reference material and glossaries. Wonderful.

Two and a half hours later, I read another e-mail offering me 66 pages of translation, which I also accepted.

As they say, "feast or famine" - literally "Festessen oder Hungernot". Or as one German phrase would have it "Sekt oder Selters".

And what has this got to do with my neck? Well, I'll tell you. When I start on these huge texts, I sort of "batten down the hatches" (sich auf etwas gefasst machen) and I sit, in one position, scarcely breathing, forgetting to drink anything, not moving a millimetre - and I do this for hours and hours at a time. I feel that I have to "break the back" of the large text and won't relax until I sense that I have got the text in my grip. 

What this means is that my muscles get stiff, especially those in my neck and shoulders, so much so that by the next day, I had developed a painful neck and something that felt like but wasn't actually a headache. This lasted 48 hours, until I felt I could relax and start moving again.

But did I complain about the pain my neck? Not likely. Not when it's because I finally get to do what I enjoy, namely translating. It's a bit like the Holy Trinity or the Kinder Surprise eggs in that it's like a three-in-one thing:

1. It's a mental challenge: I get to engage my brain cells and drag out all the knowledge I've accumulated over the years. And it's even better when there's a tight deadline. Without a deadline looming, my brain doesn't wake up.

2. It satisfies my creative streak: I might not be able to write an original book, but I still get to 'create' a sentence by choosing the grammar, the vocabulary and the word order. Even in a legal text.

3. And it pays the bills - but I get to earn money by doing something that is very satisfying for me. At the end of the day, there's a text. Much more satisfying than working in an office, pushing papers around all day or wasting time with other people's egos in meetings. 

I've had experience of working in offices in Wales, London, a place on Mallorca and here in Germany and I still count myself lucky that I can sit in my nice big office, all alone, with the radio on in the background and as much tea and coffee I can handle and no-one looking over my shoulder.

For that, I'll happily accept a pain in the neck every now and then.

And this film is a comedy, you say?

Last month, I took myself off to the cinema to see a German film: Extrawurst with a local German actor, Hape (short for Hans-Peter) Kerkeling.

The word "Extrawurst" translates literally as "extra sausage", but it means figuratively "special treatment". 

The film opens at a committee meeting of a tennis club. The chairman is merely rubber-stamping [durchwinken] the decisions he makes, not giving the vice-chairman a chance to get a word in edgeways [auch mal zum Wort kommen]. Just when they want to wrap up the meeting, a woman gets up and proposes buying a second barbecue grill so that the Muslims don't have to eat food that has been cooked on the same grill that has had pork sausages on it. 

The chairman points out that the tennis club has only one Muslim member and the man in question says he is quite happy with the current situation and doesn't need any special treatment.

This is all in the first 5 minutes or so... and then the argument really kicks off. And continues for the next 40 or 45 minutes - non-stop. Really. Just as you think they've calmed down and have agreed on a solution, then everything flares up [aufflackern] again. 

The insults and accusations each of the five main characters throw at each other are very close to the true thoughts of many man and woman in the street. I've heard or read these thoughts and ideas over the years coming out of the mouths of ordinary people. It was shocking to hear them all come out, relentlessly, one after the other. You couldn't laugh. Really, you couldn't. 

The only bit of laughter from me was when a ball machine that was being repaired in the maintenance man's small room suddenly started up and balls went flying all around the room, sometimes actually hitting the people inside it.

Another woman laughed as a chairlift at Hape Kerkeling's home went wrong and threw him onto the floor and against a wall. She laughed for at least 5 minutes. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there aghast [fassungslos] and wondering how someone can laugh at someone's physical discomfort.

One more bit of slapstick [Klamauk] was yet to come towards the end of the film: a woman in a wheelchair rolls down a gentle slope and lands in a pond. Oh, what larks [was für einene Spaß]. Or maybe not.

And this film is classed as a comedy. Right. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

For a taste of what the film was like, watch the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qwEWk5Gxi4