Julian Gough

Well, if that ain't symbolic.

(For the benefit of my North American readers, Croatia, with a population of four million people, just beat Germany, population eighty two million - and the 1954, 1974, & 1990 world champions - by two goals to one in the group stage of the European Football Championship Finals.) 

Ah, the pathetic fallacy. Back when Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth were lads, it was the weather in their poems that reflected their moods. Now, it's the football scores in our blogs. That's progress.

 Actually, my mood is more Croatia 9, Germany 9.  I hope Croatia and Germany both go through.

Nikolina just wrote from Zagreb, "Everybody here went crazy, if we get to the final, I foresee a baby boom in March '09."

The silence of the streets of Berlin is  one heck of a big, gloomy silence. They've all gone to bed early, but baby boom? Germany has lost its erection.

What do you mean, what does it mean? Must I explain everything? Can't we have a little mystery between us? Every relationship needs a little mystery.

 It's a Blau Blau Blau thing, you wouldn't understand.

Blau Blau Blau. 

As I passed through Orly airport on Saturday (about to fly home to Berlin), the woman running the x-ray machine frowned. She signaled to the man beside her. He frowned, and  signaled to the second woman, further along the conveyer belt.

The second woman grabbed my rucksack as it came out of the X-ray machine.

"Is this your bag?" she said in French.

Oui, I said.

She frowned, perhaps at my pronunciation, and began to pull on her black gloves. I tried to think what the heck I was carrying, that could look so suspicious on an X-ray. The woman plunged her gloved hands deep into my rucksack, and rummaged. I remembered what she was going to find just before she found it...

 Let us pause a moment, while I give you a little backstory.

I had spent the previous few days just outside Paris, working on the stage version of Jude: Level 1. I had wished to bring my noble co-workers a gift from Berlin, to give them strength for the coming ordeal, but there is no point bringing wine to France, chocolate is a problematic present, and what else is there? In duty-free I had almost despaired when I saw the discreet pile of cans marked in big letters Get One!, and in little letters, 1 große echte Spreewälder Gewürzgurke.

The perfect gift from Berlin! A huge local gherkin, in a can. "The gherkin snack from the homelandplace for gherkinfans" as the can said. ("Der Gurken-Snack vom Heimathof für Gurkenfans.")

 So I loaded up with enormous gherkins, one to a can, and brought them to France. We had one each. However, I was so busy I forgot to eat mine, and thus it was that on my way back through Orly airport this refined French lady now found herself holding my enormous gherkin, canned, in her black-gloved hand. "What," she said in elegant French, "is THIS?"

I was distracted from her question by the dawning realisation that I was living through a postmodern, canned version of the great moment in the rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, when bass player Derek Smalls sets off the metal detector at an American airport by walking through it with a cucumber, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed down his pants.

Blinded by this vision, I couldn't remember the French for gherkin. Our conversation got increasingly surreal as she tried to guess what the lurid, warty, green thing, pictured on the can, might be. "Get One!" didn't really help, and she couldn't read German. At one point you could see her thinking "Glow-in-the-dark vibrator? Dildo?" In French. ("Vibrateur phosphorescent ? Dildo?")

Seconds from disaster, we finally communicated. "Cornichon!" I cried. "Ein große, er sorry, c'est un grand cornichon."  "Ah!" she cried, enormously relieved. "Un cornichon!" All smiles, she handed it back to me, and I was able to bring meine große Essiggurke home to the banks of the Spree.

(An aside: I am shocked to discover that, according to Google, nobody in the long, rich, and well-documented history of the world has ever, before this glorious day, used the phrase "My Enormous Gherkin" on the internet. This seems to me extraordinary. Hardly a day goes by when I don't say it at least twice.)

Well, that bomb was dealt with immediately. The guy with the toothache probably still squezz in his appointment at the dentist's.

I said, weeks ago, that I was about to put up my next Great Book for Teenage Boys. Well, I've been trying. But for some reason I am blocked like crazy. I've written the damn thing three times, and not posted it. 

Whaddya do? Writers are crazy. And the book is a head-wrecker, so no wonder it's somehow still wrecking my head. Great book...

I'll try again tomorrow. Bombs won't stop me. Blocks won't stop me.

Something new will stop me. 

(I took the image from HERE. Not sure if they drew it themselves... 

Great excitement. They've found a World War II bomb around the corner, in Mulackstrasse, and evacuated the locality. The Rosenthaler end of Mulack Strasse has been blocked off! The dentist on the corner of Mulack and Gorman Strasse has been evacuated! Men with toothache wander about behind the barrier, disconsolate! Mighty entertainment.

 Of course, as Silvio (the gifted hairdresser who works in Denny Gehrke's of Steinstrasse) sternly points out, there's hundreds of bombs buried in Berlin, so it's not really a big deal. But for those of us not born and bred here, it's a bit of craic. 

Being around the corner, and thus protected from any potential blast, we haven't been evacuated, so we get the best of both worlds. Nothing like relaxing with a cup of coffee, with one ear cocked to hear the neighbouring flats lifted a hundred yards into the air. (Should they be so lifted.)

Ah, there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned bombscare to add a little zing to city living. And what could be more old-fashioned than a World War II bombscare?

 
Retro, yet chic. Very Berlin.