A City Near The Polish Border

When I was in my teens, I read John le Carré's novel "A Small Town in Germany" because it combined two of my favorite topics - spy stories and Germany. Nowadays, I can't imagine that I ever enjoyed reading anything so thrilling or, let's face it, serious. Apart from reading the magazine "Vanity Fair" every month, the only literary material I'm interested in today is light-hearted, chic lit stuff, comedy, or at a stretch, something clever by Stephen Fry.

While I fully understood everything that was going on in "A Small Town in Germany", I think the only thing I probably didn't appreciate fully was the title. I mean, the story as I remember it centers around Bonn, and maybe Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn. This was the town that had been chosen as the "temporary" German capital after World War II and of course the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Berlin, the original capital of Germany, had basically been cut off from the rest of the country by the creation of the East German State (the German Democractic Republic) when the Wall was built. Only West Berlin, which was "supervised" by the American, British and French forces, remained a part of West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany.

Appendicitis in Pasing

This is an excerpt from my unpublished novel "The Mummy and Daddy Christmas Present Fund"

Saturday 25^thAugust 1973

The most awful thing happened.

I went on holiday to Munich, to stay with Jenny for her 14^th birthday, which is a few months after mine. And I got appendicitis and ended up in a hospital in a place called Pasing, which is a suburb of Munich.

It started after about one week. I got all the way to Munich, and everything was fine, I had a really nice bedroom in the top floor of Jenny’s house (which is huge) and about a day after Jenny’s birthday I started to have stomach ache and vomiting.

Well then Jenny’s Mum said of course that I should go to the doctor’s, so Jenny took me because she is the only one in the family who really speaks German. So Jenny and I went to see this lady doctor, and I was telling her about my symptoms, which took quite a long time because Jenny had to translate everything (and her German is really good! I couldn’t understand a single word) and then finally this lady doctor slapped herself on the thigh and said a word and Jenny also slapped herself on the thigh and turned to me and said, Appendicitis.

Midnight Shopping

Tonight is "midnight shopping" in our town. You can shop till midnight! And there are a bunch of events (looking out of the window, I see fire jugglers), and lots of music (mostly I have just been hearing drums for the last couple of hours, but maybe it will become more melodic later).

A friend is coming to pick me up in a few minutes so that we can go and explore together. Things are much more fun when you do them with together someone else.

Tomorrow, I am going to look at three different apartments with a realtor. The idea is not that I move to a new apartment myself, but that I renovate an old one as a hobby and possibly even rent it out. This will fulfil a lifetime's dream for me. Inside this Cupcake there is an interior decorator fighting to get out.

I will report more tomorrow.