Monthly Archives: March 2016

You can say You to me.

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I had a business meeting last week with three people that I have known for years. With two of them I was “per Du”, as they say here. That means that we had agreed to address each other with the less formal version of “you” at some stage. This is much more than just agreeing to use a different word – it signifies a new level of familiarity and friendship. It’s also much easier for an Englishman because Du sounds like you, whereas the more formal Sie (pronounced Zee) is less intuitive. Continue reading →

The Tip

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I went to the tip yesterday. In fact I go nearly every Saturday morning, like most of the residents here.  Here we don’t call it the tip – it’s the “Wertstoffhof” which literally means “valuable material place”. To the modern person it is a recycling centre. I call it the tip because I grew up in the 1970s and back then there were only two way to throw things away – the bin or the tip. I can vaguely remember going to a tip once with my Dad and I think we did chuck our waste onto a common pile of junk – but I might be imagining that. Continue reading →

A Walk to the Bakery

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Saturday – time for a lie-in. But as usual I was awake sometime around 6:30 thinking about the day ahead. During the week the whole family gets up shortly after 6:00 because both daughters need to be out of the house on the way to school at 7:00. They are able to lie in a little longer at weekends, but I am not. This all seems to have happened very quickly. When the kids were small they always woke me up too early. Then suddenly they stop waking me up, but I am awake anyway. Maybe I have just forgotten but I can’t remember a time when our sleep/wake cycles synchronised properly. Continue reading →

Waiting for spring

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I cycled to work this morning, again. That’s four times this week which is more times than I managed all of last year. When I started my own business just 7km from home I swore then that I would cycle in whenever possible. Well, I decided to skip the lovely spring and summer that we had last year and only started properly a couple of weeks ago. Since that day it has rained, snowed and sleeted. There have been dry days, but they were freezing – like this morning. Continue reading →