2008 — 6 September: Saturday
Pension day: yippee! The rain, it still raineth... on and off... Tonight's picture of Christa again shows her smiling, this time in the (slightly cooler) spare bedroom in the Old Windsor house during that long, hot, summer of 1976:
Christa in the spare bedroom, 1976
Her school friend Ute has also very kindly passed along another photo from that Berlin trip in 1965. She tells me "Today a friend (Berthold Steinmetz) from my boarding school in Meisenheim sent me this photo of our class which was taken in Berlin in 1965. You will recognise Christa immediately. I am standing on the right hand side behind our teacher Mr. Hannay. Berthold who sent it, is the boy with the cigarette on the right in the second row. He is a retired vocational school teacher. The boy with the chewing gum bubble, Wolfgang Rommerskirchen, has become an actor."
I'm very pleased to see my best girl smiling just as broadly nine years or so before we met as the thought that she was happy back then is an utterly delightful one:
G'night, at 00:09 or so.
Drawing ahead... dept.
My main co-pilot reminds me he's ahead of me by a year today, but kindly points out I catch him up in a few weeks. Age? Pah! Meanwhile, the crockpot is stuffed and set to "stun". I'd briefly considered repeating the plum experiment, but decided not to. I've made slightly less volume of "mix" and am vaguely wondering what I've left out. Lamb, mint, spuds, parsnip, carrots, onion, cooking apple, shallots in red wine, stock, splosh of cooking wine — all seems to be on board. We shall just have to give it time.
The teary drought was broken, very briefly, listening to Dusty Springfield's version of a Jacques Brel song,1 translated by Rod McKuen. Or maybe it was the onion I was slicing at the time? Oh well, it's now 10:24 and the awful "Woss" is back polluting the Radio 2 space so it's a question of settling on something else. Radio 3 is pretty dreary at the moment.
A degree of stupidity... dept.
Some of the quotations by people in this story are just amazing.
The play's the thing
Christa had something in common with one of our favourite playwrights, Tom Stoppard, I learn today. At the age of 71 he reveals a wobbly side:
"I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in," he says. "I find I put a foot wrong — it could be pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history — and suddenly I'm there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket."
Christa always felt, deep down, that people would conclude from her (delightfully sexy) accent that she was a "funny foreigner". Only the idiots did, of course, and I always assured her the opinions of fools and idiots didn't matter (though they can certainly hurt).
Light dawns (as I listen to the "Moneybox" programme) about the unexpected generosity of the tax man this month. I'm seeing a rebate as a blatant attempt to buy my notoriously unfickle vote after the cretinously stupid removal of the 10% tax band. (How could they not realise that the lowest paid would be the hardest hit?)
Humour, heh?
Self-deprecation and the art of seduction...
Going one better, a friend of mine was wooed by a guy with a very classy fridge "routine" — performed the first night they met. "Oh please don't look in there," he said. "There are items in that fridge that I have to shave every morning." They were married within six months.
New Mexico university anthropologists obviously have more fun. Another one (Peter Jonason) has concluded that "Women might claim they want caring, thoughtful types... (but) what they really want is self-obsessed, lying psychopaths." (Source.)
Art for art's sake... dept.
I took my usual Friday trip into Southampton a day early this week, knowing that I had a lunch date with Len yesterday. While there I stumbled across a DVD featuring the work of Alan Moore (think Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Lost Girls, Brought to light, Ballad of Halo Jones) and (Christa would be tickled to learn) I also bought my first-ever seat cushion to replace the one I liberated from her brother's bedroom in the Meisenheim house back in 1977. I guess if the new one lasts another 31 years it will do better than I expect to.
Mr Postie, meanwhile, this morning dropped off a remastered CD of a 10cc album that came out in 1976; the last one before Godley and Creme split, in fact... I'd forgotten just how good it was, though I must have played it a dozen times within the first month. I've long admired the sleeve designs of "Hipgnosis", too.
They came from Manchester... dept.
Having hastily assembled and gobbled down a rather late but doubtless nourishing, healthy salad in mid-afternoon I've been reviewing last night's crop of Manchester-related musical items from BBC4.
Some real gems. I saw part of the final (Factory Records) documentary a few months ago, just before watching (and subsequently buying) "Control" over with Mike one evening last March. I was never a great fan of Joy Division, but I found the whole saga strangely gripping.
Now (after a very successful crockpot evening meal) I'm reminding myself (via BBC Radio 4's generally fascinating "Archive Hour") of the dreadful state of the Benighted Kingdom at the end of the 1970s just before the dreadful Attila the Hen ascended the greasy pole.