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.