Mad Shops

It's finally sunny AND warm here, and consequently a pleasure rather than a trial going for a walk. I trolled along the canal next to Hoheluftbrucke and had a charming song sung to me by a tramp for one euro - including text. Further along I came across a youth theatre which holds its performances in a huge old boat. And all along the canal there were canoes left abeam on the bank, held in place by saplings. Extremely trusting. And nice.

I emerged a long way up Ependorfer Weg, which is our main street, where I have never been before and where I saw the most bizarre collection of shops. See what you think...

It's not just me, is it? A display of handguns is kind of odd, yes?

And for all your miniature terracotta brick needs, visit http://www.teenycolosseum.com/ !

This one isn't on Epperdorfer Weg, but it made me laugh so hard it hurt... boy, have I got friends who would like to pay a visit here!

Lingua Germanica

I'm loving the German habit of sticking words together to make new ones. I guess it makes it a bit cumbersome, but it's very effective. They also love pinching English words - especially to use for new technology, it seems. They call a mobile a "handy", and no-one seems to know why. It's just a word that fits the object well, and that's a good enough reason.
I remember being stunned to learn that the French for pullover is "pull-over" - a word which has no discernible merit whatsoever in English (in my opinion) and therefore one which doesn't really deserve a passport to another language. And then yesterday, amongst the face-parts and clothing items which seem to be crucial in a first lesson in any language, what do I find? Pullover.
Surely, surely, something like woollenitemcoveringshirtandunderclothes would have been infinitely preferable.

Mother Tongue

Jenny, Heather and I are taking the plunge today - we're going to German lessons. Rory has decided to rely on his trusted brand of "Old Man Charm" as he calls it, and will continue to select the youngest and brightest shop assistant in the hope that they speak good English. It's an approach which usually works...
I don't relish being unable to ask for a bucket of water if my trousers are on fire, though, so it's back to the schoolroom for me. I probably won't learn enough today to stand me in excellent stead for "Das Rheingold" at the State Opera at the weekend, but I might just be able to order a glass of wine at the interval. Or rather, intervals.
I've only been to see Wagner once before, at ENO, and I remember calling my then girlfriend (and now missus) Sue at one of the meal breaks to moan about how much longer I was going to have to wait for the "Tristan and Isolde chord" I'd been told about. As Rossini said:
"Wagner - great moments, awful quarter hours".

Rant

There's a great bit in Nigel Planer's book "I, An Actor" (written in the luvvie persona of Nicholas Craig) where he complains about an actor's lot - it goes something like "...and here's muggins, me, and at the front of the queue yet again for another portion of shit cassoulet". Moments like that are mercifully rare, but I had one today.

Everyone else has been asked, unbidden, to castings for a German Yellow Pages commercial, and it pays a bloody fortune. I confess it was all I could do not to stamp my foot in rage at the sheer injustice of it, and it was only the fact that I want the others to do well that made it even slightly bearable. Sheeeesh.

I guess the shoe's on the other foot, though. I had a casting myself last week, for a eLearning video. As soon as I saw the breakdown, I thought "Nivea Man" - in other words they want that bloke who advertises razors, deodorant or whatever. Definitely not me. "You go, but you know" as I generally say to myself. And so it was. I expect Mr Chiselled will be filming it about now, if he can squeeze it in between his Handsome Lessons.

Rant over.

A Little Trouble

We've all been suffering a bit from skin dryness and rashes, and we've generally been putting this down to climate/water/terrible cheap shower gel. But I seem to have suffered rather more, and especially in one particular, umm... arena.

On Saturday, then, I had to go see the doctor. Just my luck, it's a woman. But very, very nice and with great English, and it's not too awful when she asks me to show her what the trouble is.

She takes one brief, confident, professional look and announces "it's a fungal infection". I heave a sigh of relief that it's not some insane disease (my mind has been working like yeast, ironically) and she writes out a prescription for whatever the German equivalent of Canestan is. Then she says;

"You should also try a bath in a weak camomile tea solution"
"A bath? A bath?" I say, "Jesus, how many bags will I need for that?".

There's a moment of puzzlement on her face, then it clears.

"No, not a bath for you" she says, and nods towards my belt buckle, "for him".

No Red Carpet For Me, Then...

The RHOSCARS (see posts passim) are on this Sunday, and it seems my suspicions were totally unfounded. I was to be one of only three other VIP's - along with a cabaret artiste, a costume designer and someone who didn't pop up on Google - and there would have been some pomp and ceremony. To wit - they wanted a biography for a welcoming introduction to the assembled throng, and they asked if I would mind presenting an award. Mind?

Alas, it cannot be. My penguin suit will remain in mothballs for another year and I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed that I'm still an "outstanding alumnus in the field of acting" for 2010. Boo.

Spoke Too Soon

Can you imagine what the staff are like in here?

Shank's Pony

It's got to the stage where I'm in danger of only seeing my flat, the tube station and the theatre. So this morning I took a little walk to Eppendorfer Baum, which I've passed on the tube on the way here from Barmbek.

The route takes you along a wonderful, wide, tree-lined avenue which was once pretty impressive and rather expensive, judging by the grand houses on either side. I say "once" because the elevated section of the underground goes right down the middle of it.

I guess it says something about the egalitarian nature of planning here that you are at just as much risk of having your environment knackered by public transport if you're rich as if you're poor. Can't imagine an elevated railway on Bishop's Avenue, can you?

Anyway, Eppendorfer Baum is very bustling and busy and crammed with shops. There's a great bookshop, in which I felt like a proper ignorant tourist - the sort that cannot even attempt a text in the native language. The staff were not what I was expecting, though. Charming, friendly middle-aged ladies. Compare that with your typical Waterstone's employee (frustrated authors exacting revenge on an uncaring world by being snide to the book-buying public) and I know where I'd rather browse.

Hands

After God knows how long in this business, sometimes I still have no idea what to do with my hands on stage. When I'm not talking, I mean. When you've got lines then you gesticulate and emphasise and drive home salient points, but when you're listening then you either have to hope you have pockets or just stand there like a peculiarly inanimate ragdoll. I'd love to see a speeded-up version of my performance - it must look like a carefully choreographed ballet for hands. I hope it does - I do give it a lot of thought, after all.

There's a great play by Daniel MacIvor, the Canadian playwright, called "This Is A Play" where the actors speak their thoughts on stage, interspersed by the supposed dialogue. It's hilarious - the young male actor strides on, thinking/vocalising "I enter with CONVICTION!" and then trips over his own feet. He then agonises about messing up his big entrance. Anyway, somewhere in this someone says "I take up position centre-stage, plant my feet and wonder...what to do with my hands". So I don't think I'm alone.

This morning's show was a bit tougher than they have been. Mainly a school audience and some pensioners, and the young people were a bit restless. Early in the day, hot lights etc. Still, my flares almost got an entrance round, and the scatological jokes got big laughs.

Little Things To Make You Smile

I collect stuff. Not any old stuff, but a little glassware and some ceramics. And touring is a great way of expanding your collection, because you end up in places you'd never go normally and find junk shops and flea markets that you'd never dream existed.

I've found great (and quite rare) glassware in Perth, King's Lynn, Glasgow and loads of other places I've completely forgotten. And now in Hamburg. Here's what I picked up yesterday.

It's Whitefriars, which is an English art glass factory that shut in the 70's. Consequently it's quite collectable. And if you bought that in England you'd probably see no change from £30. Price in Hamburg? Five of your lovely euros. I'm so glad that my endless drunken evenings with my friend who works at Sotheby's weren't entirely wasted...

The World Notices!

This is what the Google translation of Die Welt's review said:

"And that, for son John (Steve Dineen) and daughter Nina (Heather Tracy) by no less than her life's happiness, is not tangible in the game level."

I don't think I could have put it better!

Washing

When you’re living like we are, basically in student-type flats, you’re more or less forced to revisit student experiences. For example:

• Sleeping in a single bed with flannelette sheets. No Egyptian cotton bedlinen here!
• Washing up by hand - although pans and baking tins ensure that you never really lose that skill, no matter how much you’d like to.
• Eating on the cheap, and consuming quantities of liquid carbohydrates (i.e. beer)
• Cooking on solid hot plates (Nurse! The screens!) with non-stick pans that stick and implements which amply explain why the pans have lost their Teflon.
• Washing clothes by hand or launderette.

This last is the big one for me. I haven’t used a launderette since I left drama school, and as for washing by hand – well, it’s in the mists of time. I do remember emergency washing ONLY THE ARMPITS of my black shirts when I was about sixteen to prolong their life for another day, using that grim green Fairy soap in the downstairs bathroom basin - itself exactly the same shade as the soap (the basin’s still there now). Consequently the pits of those shirts went gradually greyer and greyer, which made it look as though I had dust for sweat and which was infinitely more obvious than a mild case of body odour would ever have been.
Am I also right in thinking there was a soap actually called B.O. in the 80’s? I think it appeared at the same time as Zest, but lasted only a short while – I supposed everyone thought that it caused rather than countered the dreaded whiffy armpits. It also occurs to me that deodorant for men was largely unknown. Instead we had aftershave – aftershave, never “cologne”. The comical Brut 33 (with mildly homoerotic adverts starring Kevin and ‘Enry); Denim (very racy, and designed “for the man who doesn’t have to try...too hard”) and Blue Stratos (my choice). I have still never met anyone who wore the legendary Hai Karate, the absurdly macho Pagan Man or even worse, Jovan Musk (with pheromones!!!).

Grafitti

You don’t see much graffiti where I live in the UK. We’re far too middle-class for that in Oxfordshire. And perhaps it’s my imagination, but there seems to be much less in London nowadays? But the normally lawful Hamburgers like wall art, and if Sternschanze excels at anything (like Wolverhampton’s misspelled signs – see posts passim) then it’s graffiti in all its variety. Some of it is extraordinary:

But of course, where you get that you also get this:

Lonely (A Bit)

In the normal scheme of things I’m pretty self-reliant and upbeat, but today I confess I’m having one of those blow-out-your-cheeks days – you know, the ones when you say “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...” like Hancock does in that sketch about Sunday afternoons.
I’ve felt more like an outsider today than I have for a while. Sternschanze is one of those places like Camden or Soho, where the locals float around having coffee in their favourite bar and look askance at trippers. I remember doing it myself when I lived in Belsize Park, and I had no idea how unpleasant it is for the recipients.
The local video store wouldn’t let me join – no Hamburg address in my passport – and I could really do with some mindless action thriller to pass the time (last night I watched an appalling dubbed Dolph Lundgren film called “Silent Trigger”, and some alarming amateur German porn which made me blench and, at times, look away in horror). After I left the video store, I had a sort of face-off with some massive geezer in the street. He left me a tiny portion of pavement to pass him, and as I was doing just that – sideways - he cornered me against a shop window, so to get past him I would have had to physically move him out of the way. We stood there in this bizarre tableau until I said “Entshuldigen Sie” and he finally let me pass. To misquote Marwood in Withnail and I “my heart was beating like a fecked clock”.
I know, of course, that it had nothing to do with my being English, nor with his being German, for that matter. After all, we’re not short of gits like that in the UK. But it amplified my feelings of isolation and made me think with renewed wonderment about the friends I have in the UK who just pitched up from overseas and decided to make a life for themselves in a strange country. Especially the ones who’s English wasn’t up to much and who decided to make acting their career. Brave – or rather mutig.

schlechte Bewegung

OK, here's the thing. Sternschanze is basically the Brixton of Hamburg - very lively, very busy and crowded and loud, especially at night (and most particularly on Friday and Saturday). This would be great if I were 25, sharing with someone and didn't intend spending many weekend nights asleep. But I'm 42, on my own and fond of my kip.
There's also the trains. There's a U-bahn and S-bahn line within sight of my bedroom window, and I'm a famously light sleeper. In fact, the sound of a phone vibrating on a kitchen table in a flat upstairs has been known to wake me, so I have only marginally less trouble than Travis Bickle getting some shut-eye.
So last night I didn't sleep at all. Nada. Or rather, nichts. I read some chick-lit book called "My Lurid Past" about a PR girl who suddenly finds casual sex with anodyne hunks unfulfilling. I watched the German equivalent of "Quiz Call", which is exactly the same as the UK version except they wear slightly fewer clothes. And I ate rye bread with peanut butter and honey, and tried all the leftover pickles in the fridge. Ugh.