Bob Geldof was right....

... about several things, although I can only really think of two - the Band Aid record and not liking Mondays.

The reluctant housewife is becoming even more so the longer she remains unemployed. Try as she might, she cannot gain satisfaction from picking bits of cereal off the carpet or cleaning bathrooms. Spicing up her life means, these days, thinking about buying a new laundry basket as she is so sick of the old one, or maybe vacuuming the house with her eyes shut (she doubts that anyone would notice). Or writing in the third person as opposed to the first. Quirky, huh?

Blogging about the delights of Bavaria is hard when a permanent layer of freezing fog prevents you from seeing anything (apart from people flying their eagles and stuff like that). The good neighbours, the NNs, are rarely to be seen, which is a shame as they are a jolly good source of amusement value. (One is sure, though, that they will be omnipresent from April to November, thus compensating for their current elusiveness.) The only time Herr NN pokes his little nose out of the door is when it starts snowing. First he checks through the window. You can see him monitoring the situation hourly. When he deems the snow deep enough, he brings out his snow-blower and makes a horrendous noise for a couple of hours. The rest of the time he stays in the warm, watching his orchids growing and drinking beer.

The reluctant housewife has procrastinated long enough for this morning. Time to go and attack those fruit loops.

Let's go fly a kite

You might think that nothing would shock me anymore around here. The saying still waters run deep could have been designed for Bovinia, where the apparent tranquil exterior masks a myriad of strange goings-on, both inside and out. Firstly I can testify to the fact that the wine industry is thriving here. A short trip to the bottle bank this morning confirmed that not only CG and I are relying on a bottle or two of something to stave off the freezing boredom of winter. And as for outside - how about people who take their pet eagle out for a quick fly before dark? Yes, it's true. I was picking my way along an icy road when I saw what appeared to be a person flying a kite, or at least trying to get the kite up in the air; you know, that way you have to kind of throw it upwards until it finds an air current and takes off. It wasn't much of a kite, I thought to myself, rather dark and shabby and flopping about a bit. When it did eventually take off, though, I realised that it was none other than an extremely large bird of prey, which circled around a bit, dive-bombed once or twice, then flew back to its owner, who was swinging some piece of dead animal on a rope. I tried not to stare too much as there was a scary little man, clearly an accomplice of the eagle person, standing by a rusty VW polo smoking a cigarette. He glared as I ran past, as if defying me to so much as raise an eyebrow at something that, for most of us anyway if you don't live in a falconry, was quite unusual. I couldn't help but notice that there was no cage of any kind in the car - presumably the eagle sat on the back seat or flapped about in the boot.

Fun though it would have been to watch the pair of them wrangle their pet into the car I proceeded onwards, as the sun had already gone behind the mountains and the streetlights were coming on. The last thing I wanted to was to get mixed up in some sort of pre-prandial brawl on my way past the Alpenhof pub. It is a well-known fact that some people here start their daily Jägermeister consumption just after breakfast. They are, therefore, spoiling for a fight by six p.m.

Kestrels and Brownies - cryptic or what?

Yesterday I saw a kestrel killing and carrying off a blackbird. Nature is brutal, is it not?

But that is not what I wanted to write at all. No, I merely wanted to say that tomorrow is Hedda's ninth birthday, and I feeling strangely calm and collected, considering we've got nine girls coming to stay the night. I think I know why. Hedda, whose middle name is usually high-maintenance, has decided she doesn't want a novelty party cake, i.e. something that requires work. Only a tray of brownies with ice cream. In a positive flush of efficiency I have already baked these (not the ice cream, obviously), bought 3 kilos of oven chips and 36 mini pizzas. The showpiece will be our totally kitsch cocktail fountain (with colour-changing lights), which I shall fill with apple juice.

PS: My standards must be slipping. I just went to Aldi wearing my tracksuit bottoms and no earrings.

Slippery slopes and icy patches

I've given up reporting on snow, how deep it is, how slushy/icy/white/grey it is, how nice the mountains look. You can pretty much assume that, unless I wax lyrical about wonderfully unseasonal hairdryer weather, it is snowy, cold and boring. I am not unproud of the fact that I get out there almost every day and pound the streets, regardless of their condition. In fact, I would say that I have become quite adept at not falling over (apart from this morning when I nearly broke my leg running down a hill and am therefore about to buy some winter running shoes with spikes on). However, there are still places where I have to be terribly careful not to fall over backwards. Now normally, when out running, I see nobody at all. The occasional dogwalker or horserider, or a man having a sneaky pee behind a barn - he was so freaked out when I ran up behind him and coughed loudly - but apart from that noone is out there braving the elements in a lunatic way EXCEPT those old, weatherbeaten farmer types, who never seem short of something to do. And it is always when I am negotiating a horribly icy patch that I find one of them watching me, leaning on his shovel/scythe/pitchfork/other longhandled farming tool, only his eyes moving in an otherwise impassive face. Inwardly I pray that I will not choose this moment to fall over, because I know that they won't respond with a chirpy Bavarian equivalent of 'enjoy your trip, come back next fall'; rather, they will regard me in silence as I pick myself up and dust the snow and horse manure off my backside and lumber off, red in the face if I wasn't already. So far God has been kind. I might have wobbled a bit, but I've remained upright. When I get my icebug shoes, though, you won't see me for slush. I'll be past those farmers before they've even raised their heads from their respective muck heaps.

Momentous decisions

I can't think why I haven't told anyone this yet. On New Year's Eve, I decided - almost rashly but with great conviction - that I will donate my body to medical research when I'm dead (I thought about doing it while alive, but I've heard it hurts a bit). Reason being, I'll probably be in Germany when I die - a safe assumption right now, anyway. And in Germany, if you choose to be cremated, your nearest and dearest don't get the souvenir urn to put on their mantelpiece or take up Mt Snowdon to throw your remains to the mountain winds. The urn is buried in the cemetery here. I don't think you can even touch it. I clearly remember how I felt as we, the ones left behind, attended the burial of my father-in-law's urn. A spotty youth wearing white sports socks (I don't know why, but this struck me as particularly offensive) walked ahead of us with ostentatious ceremony, holding the hanging urn out in front of him with his skinny arm. He had a post-nasal drip. The hole in the ground resembled one you might dig to plant a small tree. Everyone was silent and awkward and uncomfortable. It makes me shudder just writing about it.

Since then I have often said that I would like to be cremated in England, and CG or whoever - Gaia perhaps - would be free to choose from my many beloved beauty spots as to where they'd scatter me. However, it costs a bomb to fly a body back to its home country, and I am not sure that EasyJet or Ryanair do it. If they do, there's bound to be an unaffordable surcharge. So it would be the urn in the hole for me. Theoretically. But no more! I shall make some medical students happy and save thousands of euros in funeral costs at the same time. All I request is one of those naff benches with a plaque on it, and someone with a good sense of humour - I delegate my brother this task - can dream up a suitable epitaph. And occasionally come along and wipe off the bird droppings.

The Titanic Obsession

Titus has been obsessed with the Titanic since the beginning of December. He's seen the movie, he's read the book (or at least had it read to him)... no detail is too small or uninteresting. We've done character analyses on Captain Smith, and social analyses on the class differences, raising questions as to the injustice of the rich people's better chances of survival. Time and again, we have questioned the idiocy of neither having enough lifeboats on board, nor being able to lower them into the ocean when fully laden. The obsession even extends to the private lives of the main protagonists of the film, namely Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio. Titus believes that if they had got married in real life, Kate "wouldn't have wasted time with her two ex-husbands" and that Leo "would have been married by now, and not be waiting for his girlfriend to say yes". (He may have a point, but I doubt they would be interested.) We know, now, that the Titanic had four funnels, only three of which were functional. We know what the three classes had for dinner. And we speculate endlessly on what became of Rose (Kate Winslet's character) and how she managed to live so long. And why she insisted on bringing her goldfish to the research ship.

Usually Titus' obsessions fade after a couple of weeks and are replaced by a new one. Not this time. This morning, on the way to kindergarten, I was coerced into a quick roleplay, where he was the captain of RMS Carpathia (again, sorry if you already know, but if not - this was the ship that came to the Titanic's rescue) and I was various sad, cold, wet passengers who had just been hauled out of the lifeboats. The captain was trying to make a list of all the survivors' names. It was quite a challenge even for my imagination, which is, to say the least, vivid. Perhaps it didn't help that we were struggling along in a blizzard.

I will get a brief period of respite this afternoon, as his friend Joseph is coming to play. Try as he might, Titus cannot get anyone else of his age to be interested in a ship that sunk 99 years ago.

You will eat this... because we say so!!!!

Sorry - there was no internet yesterday (why????) but it seems to be back today. All a big mystery. Anyway, you didn't miss much. I have nothing of amusement or other value to report. Only, perhaps, an update on the sinister tiger glove puppet at Titus' kindergarten. Standing watching the kids frolicking in the snow yesterday lunchtime, I found myself next to the fierce and devout teacher. She said nothing, I said nothing. But then an inner voice told me it was now or never. Could you please explain this tiger puppet game to me, I asked. She launched into a detailed explanation. When she was done I asked what the tiger had against rice cakes. The ensuing discussion was so ridiculous and impossible to translate that I present you here with a mere synopsis: whoever the people in charge of nutrition are, at whatever the place, wherever it might be (presumably in Bavaria), they have decreed that the right and proper mid-morning snack must be a sandwich of wholemeal bread, the darker the better, with crusts, and, even more better, seeds or nuts. The filling of the sandwich is irrelevant. I know, because I checked. Teacher offered me a flyer about nutritional information, which I declined, feeling I had been patronised enough. So much for it being a free country. Do you think they'd mind if I put nutella in the sandwich?