Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Coupling v coupling

I've been joined for the Balkans leg of my journey by Ludvig, a polyglot Swede of quite disgustingly comprehensive knowledge.

Last night we stumbled back to our hotel and didn’t feel like going straight to bed.

“Chess?”, I suggest.

“Humph”, he replies.

“Wanna watch something?”, I ask.

“Sure. What?”

“Well, what about Coupling?” (a British sitcom I introduced him to a couple of weeks ago).

“Err, ok… I think I have an episode on my computer”, he says sheepishly.

So I went and had a showed and brushed my teeth and came back into the room to find him sitting on the bed, with a porn video playing on his computer.

Slightly uncomfortably, I lay on the bed and watched a girl do something which most baulk at.

A few minutes pass. Porn is not something men should watch together, so I suggest to my beloved Passe-partout that perhaps we should put Coupling on, as agreed.

He looks at me, blankly. Seconds pass.

“What do you call this?”

The penny drops. Ludvig had forgotten the name of the sitcom, and misinterpreted my suggestion of watching coupling as being, well, a suggestion to watch ‘coupling’.

Turns out he didn’t even have the sitcom on his computer anyway. So we turned in, to an understandably restless sleep.

Monday, September 24, 2007

A happy day with the happiest people

Each time this past week I’ve started writing this entry, I’ve begun by discussing a different theme, then got distracted, and found that the thing which distracted me was equally deserving of some attention – and being more recent, therefore a better way to begin.

This, needless to say, is going to be a problem all year unless I figure out a way to get a handle on it and just sit down and write what comes. So I’ve had a chin-scratch about the various things I’ve seen and experienced in the past week or so, and decided to tell you about Families’ Open Day at a metallurgy workshop for the mentally challenged, in a small town an hour outside Munich. Because a lot can be said about life’s capacity to be utterly and tediously shit and unfair (and I say a lot of it myself), but sometimes you get to see something pretty special. And last Sunday, something truly special I did see.

Before getting to that though, I’d like to beg your patience in permitting me reproduction of a bit from the inimitable Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness. He wrote, in 1930:

“The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth [man] can gratify all his whims without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

This paragraph bears reproduction because we all know people, whether by type or by individual, who through their pursuit of recognition or material wealth have come to value each further acquisition relatively less and less. I’m pretty sure we as humans feel the greatest happiness of all from having our basic needs met and from not having that which we truly value taken away. Yet few of us can know this other than in the abstract because we go a lifetime with having those basic needs threatened. Seldom in the developed world do people unavoidably go hungry or thirsty or without shelter at night. Seldom are parents unable to offer basic health care to their children. Seldom do people live in chronic, untreated, tortuous pain.

Thankfully, I’m not one of these either, so this may all be more presumption than assumption. But it seems clear to me that the hot meal to the starving family or the water to the parched child, or the warm blankets to the freezing homeless person, or the parent who sees his or her child given life-saving medication – well, this must give the most happiness, relatively speaking, of all. I don’t think you have to experience it to know viscerally what it would mean.

So as one goes up the list from Basic Needs, to Recommended Things, to General Desirables, to Material Items of Lust, to Frivolous Luxuries – each offers less and less happiness to the man who has climbed already all the previous rungs of the ladder. Russell’s point, I think, is that real happiness can only be born from challenges and the overcoming of them. “Life is supposed to be Hard” is probably the appropriate platitude here (although often substituted by people who should know better with its patronising and asinine sibling, “Life wasn’t supposed to be Easy”).

But semantic snobbery notwithstanding, last weekend I had the supremely rewarding experience of a day spent playing various sporting games with mentally challenged Germans (tut tut, no jokes), at which I was markedly less successful than one might otherwise expect. Yet the whole thing was rigged and I’d like that noted for the record. But I’ll come back to how the referees were out to get me a little bit later.

Anyway, I headed to a small town about an hour outside Munich, with my old friend Jim and his girlfriend, to visit her brother’s Open Day at his workshop. His name is Flo, he’s 18, he has a Down’s Syndrome girlfriend called Judith, and the Bavarian state pays for the most splendidly appointed workshop where various mentally challenged people of all ages and levels of disability get to acquire skills in woodwork and metallurgy and sell what they create to the community. The items they were producing were way beyond my meagre capabilities in this regard (drill bits, gears, models, pen holders) but that’s hardly the point.

The point is that for a whole day, I was given a tour of the workshops by the students – each, to a person, beaming with pride at their Centre and what they do. Flo earns the nominal amount of €57 per month for his travails, but he (as with the majority of the students there) lacks any real conception of relative monetary value, so his sense of accomplishment at what he does during his workday could hardly be greater. He won’t ever be able to have a “proper” job, and every society in the history of the world has had those unable to do so. But through this program, he and Judith get the sense of self-worth that only the creation of a ‘thing’ can give. The ‘thing’ can be physical or not, but an individual’s self-esteem is dictated by his or her knowledge that – whatever the challenges faced or caveats attached – he or she provides something to the community as a whole.

So after the tour of the workshops at which things were produced that I couldn’t even name let alone make, we came to the gorgeous open grassed courtyard (pictured) where a series of stations were set up with games being played. Darts, table tennis, basketball, beer curling, football and target shooting – each supervised and refereed. I was giddy with excitement.

Let me underline that although it admittedly wasn’t my greatest ever sporting performance, the predominant reason I was taken to the cleaners by a bunch of smiling, giggling adult-children with IQs in the 60s was SHAMELESS AND CYNICAL NEPOTISM by referees hell bent on my humiliating destruction. By the time I received my condescending Certificate of Encouragement and consolation prize alongside a ten year old girl with half an ice cream smeared over her face and who kept walking in circles, my mortification and the shame brought upon my family… was complete.

But they all came over to me, smiling as bloody always, and held my hand and felt sorry for me and I had that rare and exquisite moment, when time stops still and you can see beyond the abject shittiness of practically everything, the cynicism and greed and manifest unfairness and palpable human suffering which surrounds us – and you see that there is, once in a while, real goodness in Man.

Because even thought Germany is bankrupt and the social democratic model they espouse may very well be ultimately unaffordable, not a penny, not one single penny of funding for this magnificently compassionate enterprise I visited comes from private charity. It is paid for by the State, because, one can only assume, the fine citizens of Bavaria have concluded that there aren’t many more important things to spend money on than ensuring that those without opportunity – through no fault of their own – get a real and fulfilling life. I know the citizens themselves don’t organise these projects directly, but unless there is popular support, such projects never get off the ground. People, in other words, want – they demand – facilities like this to exist.

And so, I was struck, dumbstruck in fact, by the pervasive goodwill about the place, by the sense of care and community and pride. Russell was right about this: those who have obstacles to overcome, who cannot ‘acquire easily things’ are able to better extract life’s little happinesses in the long run. And as I ate my enormous and unnecessarily stinky fish and accompanying pretzel (pictured) and watched a dance performance which, despite what it lacked in grace and choreography made up for in hysterical enthusiasm (pictured too) I reflected once again that there are rare but special moments when you see humanity’s best rather than its worst – and it surprises you every time. Thus it was that I got to pass an educational and heartwarming day in Bavaria with the happiest people you could ever hope to meet.

For that, I would like to thank them all.

I’m in Austria now, and off to Hungary tomorrow, where I will tell you about how the Bavarians undid all their abovementioned good work by chasing me out of Garmisch-Paternkirchen with white sausages and pitchforks.

Bastards.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Hear ye, Hear ye! The stereotypes are coming!

Liberal orthodoxy dictates that stereotypes are necessarily evil; manifestations of lazy thinking and unfair generalisations - which lead inevitably to prejudice against groups and consequent discrimination. I remember vividly sitting with two hundred addle-minded girls in an undergraduate social psychology lecture theatre as a flow chart demonstrating this very progression was displayed in full Orwellian splendour on the big screen up front. (Let me underline, before going on, that they weren’t addle-minded because they were girls – it just happens that social psych students tend to lack critical thinking, and also happen to be overwhelmingly female. If your eyes are disdainfully rolling already, this piece is probably going to irritate you).

Nevertheless, we’re taught that stereotypes are not merely destructive (e.g. a prevailing belief among men that women lack critical thinking capabilities), but that they are necessarily wrong. This always bugged me. Such dogma seems predicated on the fantasy that there is some subterranean factory someplace where Machiavellian little toads rub their hands in glee, whispering, “What injury can we cause to group X today? What dastardly untruth shall we concoct and how best can we disseminate it to the unthinking masses?”

This theory – albeit deliberately absurd – has never seemed at all satisfactory. Stereotypes are neither malevolently constructed nor arbitrary. It may very well be that some do cause hurt in some situations. But a line must be drawn between group stereotypes on the one hand (“Americans understand less about the world outside their country than most other nationalities do”), and on the other, downright falsehoods for evil ends (“Jews drink babies’ blood”; “Muslims value life less than us”).

My point – which I have taken a laborious route in arriving at – is that stereotypes for the most part have basis in fact. A de facto social peer review means that the collective observations of outsiders are honed and passed on and modified and affirmed until they become prevailing wisdom. This doesn’t make them wrong. Whenever a broad statement is made, (“men are rubbish at interpersonal communication compared with women”; “women are usually incapable of reading maps”), the familiar retort from the listener (“Tut tut…that’s such a generalisation!”) drives me round the bend. Of course it’s a generalisation! Of course there are many exceptions! Are we to add a defensive caveat or footnote every time we opine on group characteristics? Has political correctness watered down the expression of opinion such that we speak in tortured parentheses?

It drives me bloody mad.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that I seldom find stereotypes to be outrightly unjust. Having just spent a week in Switzerland (one of the few European countries I had never spent any proper time in before) and having been in both the French and Germans regions and both urban and rural, I have this to conclude: The Swiss really are as everyone imagines. Exceptionally organised, professional and impressive at virtually everything they do. They seem fanatical about cleanliness, (I’m writing on the train at the moment, I just popped to the toilet with the usual miserable apprehension one has when approaching a public convenience in a moving vehicle and found it so clean one would have no justified compunction sleeping there – space notwithstanding), they’re rather isolationist, deeply protestant and very proud of their country.

To digress for a moment – it’s been a particularly interesting week to be here. The general elections are next month and the Swiss People’s Party (you can probably guess their position on the spectrum – why do all fringe groups have such self-reverentially populist names?) has been plastering posters all over the country, depicting a group of white sheep standing on a Swiss flag, kicking a sole black sheep off of it. Subtle – à la “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”(Tory Party, 2005) – it is not. And it is the kind of overtly racist populism that would provoke a vociferous outcry in any Anglo-Saxon country.

It’s made the foreign press (it was in fact my father in Australia who alerted me to it) and my impromptu anecdotal research into the issue (haranguing baristas, a couple of interviewees and friends’ friends to understand more) has led me to the conclusion that:

1. The Swiss do think that the Swiss are racist;
2. But the urban Swiss think it’s only the rural hillbillies; and
3. The French Swiss blame the German Swiss and vice versa.

The outside opinion of the Swiss is, I think, that their cultural and ideological isolation is probably a function of their geography and history. Topographically impenetrable to armies, the Swiss have never troubled themselves with trifles such as membership of international organisations or military coalitions. And the extraordinary wealth of the country – particularly in the two major cities – is a relatively modern thing. Aside from the astonishing, almost eye-watering natural beauty of alpine Switzerland, Geneva and Zurich’s streets are paved with gold Because Of The War. Something they don’t like to talk about very much.

I should wrap up because there are Americans reading this and we all know they have the attention spans of gnats with ADD, so I’ll finish with my splendid discovery last week that the Germans refer to the Dutch as Kaaskoppen (sic) – “Cheeseheads” – and that the Dutch call the Germans the Moffen (sic again) – an acronym-made-collective-noun for “People Without Friends”. I mention this only to observe that national stereotypes are really no different from general pejoratives. You take them with a pinch of salt, you laugh at the recognition that the Germans are friendless, the Italians idle, the French arrogant in a way which nowadays covers up a real lack of national self-esteem, the English either desperately stiff or mortifyingly ill-behaved, the Americans big-hearted but without irony or nuance, and the Australians friendly and simple larrikins.

I could go on, but it would only invite further indignation from the aforementioned among you. Suffice to say that – as far as I’m concerned – I love stereotypes. I love it when they’re affirmed. I love it when they’re resisted. I love learning new ones. I love discovering what different peoples think of each other. I love how the macrosocial machine comes up with easy ways to lump people together. I love being vindicated and I love being surprised. And travel is the only way to love it all, to learn it all, to drink it all in, even if you end up with conclusions which invite opprobrium from those who never questioned the prevailing orthodoxy that Stereotypes are Evil.

So all you addle-minded girls can just fuck right off.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Adolescents Genevois

I’ve just returned from passing a supremely pleasant couple of hours sitting on the bank of Lake Geneva – a place of such both natural and man-made attractiveness that you can’t help but feel it’s showing off and should really just shut the hell up.

You have astonishingly opulent 19th century buildings lining the waterfront, which project the sort of architectural insouciance that comes from not having been built, ever, to a budget. Each is adorned with a logo at the top – invariably some watch brand which produces timepieces costing a year’s average salary or the kind of bank which doesn’t let you through the door unless you’re wearing one of those watches. You cannot help but come to the conclusion that they’re all in cahoots. A lot of people here are making a lot of money. But that’s the Swiss way – and there’s little new to add about that.

Beyond the row of buildings and the tree-lined boulevards is the Lake itself – although it’s only recognisably a Lake when you look at an aerial map. From the ground it is a harbour, complete with seagulls, cafes, people pottering in boats, and cantankerous elderly men sitting under trees, watching the world go by.

So, there I was sitting under a tree watching the world go by, gazing at the distant snow-capped mountains which drop to the water’s edge, when I found myself looking at a group of teenagers on the waterfront just hanging around idly in the way that only groups of teenagers apparently know how.

When I saw them first, I felt the Pavlovian exasperation welling up inside; exasperation that even when you come to a place as cultured and sophisticated as Geneva, you still can’t escape the marauding little brats. (I lived in Kentish Town in north London last year and spent most Saturday nights declining dinner invitations so I could stand at my window and scowl. I am, I fear, trying to stare down middle age and so far I have been the first to break the glance).

But after the initial reaction passed and I stopped sneering, a couple of things struck me. Yes, of course they were dressed like idiots – the boys each porting a metric ton of cheap jewellery, umpteen inches of underwear self-consciously visible and enough hair product to keep OPEC afloat – and yes of course the girls were giggling like pubescent hyenas. But then they started to dance.

Only the guys, and they started performing – without any music – impressively acrobatic dance manoeuvres that I could never hope to imitate without pulling a body-length chain of muscles. And the people taking a stroll along the boardwalk stopped to watch and laugh and smile at them and not for a moment did these pierced chav/punk/ghetto human amalgams care for a moment that they were being watched by anyone but the girls around them. They were completely and utterly unselfconscious.

And the bile which had risen in my belly slunk down again and I smiled into the salty sunny breeze and thought that even though they were dressed like Eurovision rejects, performing what can only be described as a mating ritual and presumably conversing in some godawful nonsense vernacular, I admired them a great deal. I wished I could be them – dancing on a lakeside thoroughfare in the midday sun while tourists like me did nothing but nervously snap away with our cameras.

I should have gone up to them and got to know them a bit, but I didn’t. The next time that happens, I surely will.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

The joy of the train


It’s not the most original observation ever, (in fact it would probably struggle to be in the top ten thousand if there were a book compiling them – which I just might write now I think about it), but there is really no way to travel than by train. You can take your über-cheap no-frills airlines; your fast and spacious air-conditioned coaches; your chav-enabling and shopping mall ferries; even your delightfully-handling hired German sedans, complete with sat nav and leather bucket seats, and you can keep them all for all I care. Because there is only – and always will only be – the train. The tilting, the clacking, the Géricault-scale windows, the restaurant car with linen tablecloths: I defy anyone to ever create a more pleasant way to travel**.

Unsurprisingly, I’m writing from one now. The trip from Cologne to Geneva is a leisurely seven-hour wind through the south German countryside with the cabbage pickers speeding through the window stickers and the terrain changes dramatically as you hit Switzerland. It climbs and undulates and rolls and seems a caricature of how you imagine German Switzerland to be: rural, clean, green, mountainous and heart-meltingly lovely. And it is barrelling past me now and the sun is coming out and I have in my hand a superb of coffee on this fabulously well-appointed train – and what travel fatigue I already have from the drag of carrying my half-ton bag is easing easily away.

Geneva beckons and I have found my second wind for the day. I don’t know if it’s oddly-dressed white people singing at the top of their lungs – but the hills are alive with something here.


**Unless, naturally, you are taking a British train, in which case getting pulled along at 20mph by oxen attached to your pubic hair is an order of magnitude pleasanter. And I suspect too that when they eventually give us the damned rocket packs they’ve been promising since the 50s – train travel may just lose a modicum of its edge.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

The Dutch Toilet with the Ledge of Death



Some years ago
With bags in tow
I came to the Low Countries,

And many a thing
I found astonishing
The toilets being one of these.

The Dutch commode
Which I was showed
Is beyond any rational mention,

(And though I don’t wish this blog
To be a log of a bog -
It’s worth a moment’s attention).

Dutch dunnies wedge
A porcelain ledge
Between the cistern and the water,

So any human weight
(Which one might donate)
Is dropped a distance somewhat shorter.

The disgusting consequences of this
You cannot miss
Having visited the water closet,

So one wonders why
The Dutch don’t try
To improve: - but let me posit:

One friend suggests
(And I don’t think he jests)
That the Dutch are incredibly tight,

So if one were so rash
To accidentally swallow some cash
One could ‘pick through’ to one’s delight.

If this seems implausible to you
Explanation Number Two
Is dafter even than the first,

Because it is meant
That they just love their own scent
And I’m not sure which is worst.

But according to me
It’s Explanation Number 3
Which I hope to be verily right,

Because it is that
A curious cat
Cannot drown after falling in fright.

And so - I expound
While messing around
On a Dutch curiosity,

So should you find yourself
Dumping in Delft
Make sure you Brush Up on your Reasons 3.