A Hat or not A Hat - That is the Question!

In her new post, Pondside asks whether she should wear a hat or not.
I am a fan of hats - and wear them often.

This photograph is not that convincing - but the hat is fine:

I like them in winter, too (well, this is a mixture between cap and  hat):

Of course one has to stay polite: at the cinema or theatre the person behind you still should be able to follow the action :-)

The following hat I bought in Munich, it was made by a very famous milliner, but I have to confess that I didn't wear it that often (Son told me: "If you drive a Pontiac Trans AM like me, you don't have to spray it pink to get attention." Well, he has a very convincing way to persuade me. Though I liked the hat... )

This one is for "Gardening in High Heels".

And this one only for fun ( a picture from Hamburg, two years ago).

A hat is a fine way to change your appearance, and not so drastic as a new hair-colour (NO - I didn't - it's only a funny wig).

If I find a very daring hat and nobody wants to accompany me, I still have this cute 'family man":
so utterly smart!

Circus Roncalli

Saturday we were at the circus. 
I am not a big fan of circus - neither of tigers that an animal tamer whips through the manège nor of clowns (though I don't suffer from "coulrophobia" - fear of clowns). 
But when I heard that it was the Circus Roncalli, I came gladly. It is a bit more poetic. 

Though in my mind they even here use too much technique - or do you see here a difference to a rock-festival?

There was only one act with animals, though. 

A lot of acrobatic work: 

... and these was really breathtaking: Artists from the Ukraine. 

You have to trust each other completely, to do something breakneck like that! 


I wish you beautiful days till Christmas! 

Lateral Thinking sounds so much better than Muddy Thinking ...

Surprise, surprise: I really didn’t think straight. As everybody else I am trapped in my own little world – and though I sometimes dream in English (don’t ask the Grammar Godddess!) and read very much in that beautiful language and (if Husband would come with me, which he doesn’t) would pack my things to live in London, Hythe or Edinburgh (see: I’m versatile), I told you that you have to wait for the beautiful cookbook I translated, because the German publisher DuMont puts it in April 2012 on the market.

What I hadn’t thought of is THAT MOST OF YOU read my articles in ENGLISH!

So you will not need a translation. And so you don’t have to wait. The book is in your bookstore since autumn. 

Claire Ptak and Henry Dimbleby: Leon. Baking and Puddings. 

www.octopsbooks.co.uk 

Fairy-tale!

As every year the KaDeWe, Berlins luxury store, that seductively is only six minutes away from our flat, decorated its shop windows lavishly for Christmas.

This time the motto is ‚Grimm’s Fairy Tales‘ – though very liberally interpreted. 

I am especially fascinated by „The Princess and the Pea“. 

I own a genuine ‘Hügel‘ with this theme, priceless because from a very early period of his work. 

A Portrait of the Artist as a very Young Man – and if you think that ‚portrait of‘ has been used here in the wrong way: not at all. You only should ask: portrait of whom? 

Here is a game that can give much insight into the character of another human being: ask him/her, which fairy tale s/he loves best. Very often you will be surprised – even more so if you ask for the reasons of the choice.

It can happen that the gusto for a fairy tale changes in life. After being fascinated by The Fisherman and his Wife for many years, (the woman would make a career at all costs and was never content) I believed that Mother Hulda rewards the hard worker and punishes the lazy buggers (hehe – they are not called fairy tales for nothing!). Now I like The Town Musicians of Bremen with their winning motto “You will always find something better than death“ so much that I have a little silver sculpture standing on my desk. 

Doubly appropriate as I come from Bremen.

One fairy tale in the KaDeWe was difficult. Who do you believe is this? 

Sweets for my Sweet, Sugar for my Honey...

It’s funny: as a child I envied Karin, a classmate with whom I often walked back from school home, because she always had money to buy sweets at the kiosk. Karin’s parents had a drugstore, but no time.

Karin bought soda-sweets, and little eatable sponge rubber dolls that held hand endlessly like those garlands you cut out from tissue paper; she bought Salinos; Ahoy!-effervescent powder-sachets with a blue sailor on the waxen paper, that grew so strangely limp when you licked the last few small crumbs out of the edge with your tongue. Pipes from liquorice with a pink or lime green foamy filling on top, that stuck in form of a cone in the pipe bowl and had to be unhinged in one piece by a skilfully bite of the molars; rolled-up liquorice- ribbons that you held with your teeth and reeled off to your waist, and then gobbled up with lightning speed. And sticky toffees, which sometimes pulled out a filling from the tooth (Karin had a lot of fillings, it was a time when the dentist gave you sweets as a recompense for the suffered torture).

My parents disapproved of Karin, who was the first in our class to wear nylon stockings, and they disapproved of sweets before dinner – as a quite well-behaved child I abided them, mostly.

In the drugstore Meissner stood huge cans, filled to their neck with salmine pastilles (tiny rhombes of very salty liquorice) – a cockaigne, into which Mr. Meissner dipped a tea spoon and laddled the boot into a pointed little paper bag – Mr. Meissner was a friend of children and sold a teaspoon of salmine pastilles for two pennys. You sticked them in form of a star with saliva onto the back of your hand, and licked them off till they became wafer-thin. Then there were sweets that one could never suck to their end: nibble-thaler had to be bitten through till the cracknel splintered among the teeth; gobstoppers hid under their hard vanilla or powder pink shell a tiny sugar kernel and must be bitten through, and cristal raspberry sweets did not only colour your tongue excitingly red but also cut your mouth with glassy needles. Round went the horrible rumour that genuine liquorice sticks were made out of real ox blood. Highly interesting were the very personal mixtures that one created oneself: „chocolate&salmine pastilles& tiniest sugarywhite peppermint pastilles“: aaah! Even better: “chocolate, sour raspberry sweets and salmine pastilles“ – that was heaven!

Today I have the money to buy all these treasures – I could put rows of huge glasses filled with sweets onto the shelves in my rooms. Nobody would admonish me, I could downright bathe in them!

And do I do it?? No!

But yesterday I did a breach of my own rules. Did, what I never would do with the men in my life, because I want to keep them treasured in my memory as I have them in my memory – will say I never am tempted to look after 10 years what has become of an Old Love –  because: am I being stupid?

With sweets evidently I am: there they stood saucy tantalizing in look-through sachets on the counter of ‘Manufactum’: “Sweets of Yore”.

In my nostalgic brown paper bag with the slogan “They still exist, the good old things!” piled up cannon balls (devilishly salty!), golden nuts, crunchy thalers, rhubarb-vanilla clumps, raspberry sweets and sorbet pillows.

The result was predictable. In a German film of the Sixties, “Zur Sache, Schätzchen”, (“Let’s dispense with the preliminaries, cutie!”) depicting the slack life of students in Schwabing, a young Werner Enke always nagged his running gag: “The old spunk has gone!” (He was about twenty).

Let it be understood: the sweets have lost it.

I: not by a long chalk!

Detectives in Fiction and on TV

"@Britta: You like George Gently?" asked Tony Van Helsing in a comment on a comment (see: we read them). 
Do I? Do I like George Gently? About the person I'm not quite sure. I like the TV-series very much, discovered it just recently. I see and read a lot of detective fiction, above you see a little choice fom the DVDs I have. 
We endowed 6000 German (written by Germans, no translations) detective novels to the Schiller Literaturarchiv in Marbach. Normally they only harbour "High Literature". But our books were very old German detective novels (the first written before Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story), and they are double valuable because nobody ever collected them - the fate of "Low Literature", though produced in masses, is to be thrown away. Lots of them date very easily,

some become classics.

Though even a classic can be modernized: 

At the moment I delve into "A Touch of Frost", interspersed with the umptien times  meeting with "Inspector Morse". 

Had you asked me: "You like Inspector Morse?" my answer would have been a clear: "Yes! I love him!" 

PS: 

If anybody of you will recommend a detective TV-series I might not know, PLEASE do it! The winter evenings will be long... 

PPS: Thank you for your P.D.James tip, dear Anonymous: of course I should have mentioned Commander Adam Dalgliesh (and a few others :-) 

How to Stay Slim

Husband knows the signs: when I buy Brewer’s Yeast, wheat germs and blackstrap molasses it is Gayelord Hauser–Time again.

I do love this man. His most important book was “Live long – look younger.” Written in 1950, it says  almost everything that modern nutrition and health gurus preach nowadays. He stresses the blessing of good nutrition. Vitamins from real food, (especially the vitamin B family), lots of protein and lesser carbohydrates are important. He tells you to eat yoghurt with wheat germs and black molasses, eat yellow and green vegetables and avoid sugar. 

I have always been slim, but I see women with beautiful rounder figures and like that too, and I see too haggard women. This famous model I think is looking sick and poor:

And I am very concerned that male models now start to become anorexic as well. 

I do not want to sound smug. In other times women wore three ample skirts one over the other to appear thicker - which was the fashion then. As long as one feels well in ones body it is unimportant whether one has the 'ideal weight' - that differs from generation to generation. 

My aim is to remain strong, flexible and agile. And for that aim I do something, or even: quite a lot. 2 – 3 times a week I go to Kieser – a no-nonsense fitness-studio where you lift weights (that supports the back, is good against flabby arms and wobbly legs and gives you a taille). I do Tai-Chi with my dear friend Stephen Russell’s method (he is the Barefootdoctor) - that means: quicker and more energetic than the normally very slow movements. And I walk whenever I can - which is often the case.

I try to eat healthy. Gaylord is very rigid when it comes to explanations why people don’t get thinner. Of course sick people are exempted – but he believes that very seldom the glands are the culprit, but eating too much and moving too little.

I often look aghast at the monstrous portions a lot of people devour. And I seldom see that the gobbling person seems to be happy: in the tube a young lady ate a whole chocolate bar – and looked as if she was punishing herself. Why not relish that treat? A packet of crisps is automatically finished off: grip, grip, grip, cram, cram, cram – while looking at something else. At the cinema they sell those elephant-leg-sized popcorn buckets! And call their restaurants “All you can eat”!

If I eat ice cream, I take one scoop – not four. And I do not eat it every day - a treat should remain a treat. Often heavy people eat very hastily – they give their stomach no chance to say: enough. In Japan there is a saying that you should fill your stomach only to three quarters – that makes sense to me. They use smaller plates – good! Much, much better than the weird example of Mrs. Osborne who had an operation where they put a steel band around her stomach. Now, I read, her daughter will follow her example.

Health Government is very strict upon smokers. That is OK – but IF you think you have to tell your citizens what to do: why not be strict on sugar too? Fat? Additives in convenient food? In Germany we all have to pay for the back problems, overburdened joints, diabetes of sick thick people. You don’t have to jump onto the scales every day or week – just feel if your favourite pair of trousers still fits. If not: do some walking, cut back on a drink or Crème double or whatever (I do not believe in diets) or eat less for a while. I did just that when half a year after the birth of my son I didn't like the size of the T-shirt they offered me in a shop.   

I think it is the question of self-motivation and discipline. Having a sweet tooth I like a lot of sugar in my coffee – but I can resist and take only one teaspoon. When I see a large cream cake I can image what it will become in time. That does not mean that I don’t eat cake – I do, and with cream – but: I only eat a little bit. 

I don’t buy sweets for my home (except Easter or Christmas) or for my office – I know that at four o’clock in the afternoon I would become weak. But if nothing is there – I cannot eat it. And it is highly unlikely that I will go to my colleagues and beg for sweets. In front of the TV I put a plate with carrots, apple slices etc on the table: you will munch it away if some series is really suspenseful. 

From your 30th birthday on you should eat 10 calories less a day each year - when you are sixty, you should eat 300 calories a day less. I do not count calories - it should only persuade you to eat less - and then: high quality. I prefer almonds to marshmallows. (Most of the time - I am not strict). 

I often think that there must be another motive behind eating too much: boredom, not really loving oneself (Victoria Moran wrote an interesting book "Love Yourself Thin"). 

From birth on we got a body that has a special form -  round or slim, both can be beautiful. I don't like the extremes on both sides (Dear Gayelord also wrote a chapter: "Don't get too skinny" and gives you tips for changing that). 

I believe in good nutrition – that even includes 2 tablespoons of oil a day – lots of protein and vegetables and fruit. I love to cook – and my guests and I love to eat my food.  

And when I bake: I share it. So we all have fun - and stay healthy.