I recently bought an iPod Nano, and have been teasing myself with its possibilities. Started off with a few rather unsatisfying weeks, re-exploring the less hospitable, outer territories of my own MP3-ised CD collection. Since then I’ve been back on safer ground — the spoken word. It’s a wholly different experience. Being a lifelong BBC Radio 4 addict, this shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was.… READ MORE.... …
Search Results for: dusseldorf
DO NOT USE LIFT IN CASE OF FIRE It amuses me, anyway, even if it doesn’t quite come up to the high standards of semiotic ambiguity set by DOGS MUST BE CARRIED, seen next to the escalators on the London Underground. I’ve had three days of very mild debauchery in Dusseldorf. Nothing too extreme, but in a Champions League week that featured critical 2nd legs for 4 British teams, it was impossible to avoid the siren calls from McLaughlin’s Irish Bar in the Altstadt with its 3 large TV screens, each showing a different game.… READ MORE.... …
Arrived at my hotel at 6pm, to find no non-smoking rooms left. Threw a few toys out of the pram — didn’t like them much anyway — and cancelled the reservation. Returned to the street with my bags. Took a look around. Slightly daunting. Dusseldorf is cold today. Surrounded by office blocks blazing in the darkness, but little else. Was I making a mistake?… READ MORE.... …
Dusseldorf, by all accounts an elegant city nestling in an elbow of the Rhine, has been home for three days now, but I’ve not seen much of it. What I have seen plenty of is the interior of Mercedes taxis – invariably driven by heavy-set, grouchy Turks who abuse me when I question their choice of route. Trilinguality and tranquility are out the window when confronted by their dishonesty, and they revert instead to some threatening hybrid of German and Turkish.… READ MORE.... …
1. SC Freiburg vs Bayer Leverkusen (26 January 2013) Germany is one of those pleasures I discovered late in life, like tinned artichokes. My first ever visit was for the Hamburg Marathon in 2005, followed soon afterwards by the series of work trips to Dusseldorf. I liked it then, and I like it now. Enough to think about living there one day.… READ MORE.... …
My baseball knowledge needs polishing. I left the game on Thursday under the impression that the local team had lost 6-2. Apparently they actually won, 3-1. An alcohol-free week is never as much fun as a free alcohol week. I managed to scale the working week without the distraction of a hangover, but made up for it this morning. It was the morning after last night’s session at the hotel’s gloomy island bar, where I chewed the cross-cultural fat with Frank the barman and a few locals.… READ MORE.... …
So. John Tyndall is dead. Founder of the British National Party. I met this horrible man once. No, twice. I was at the Battersea Beer Festival one year (about 1988/89) and got talking to a middle-aged Asian guy. We got on quite well, had a bit of a laugh. He was really quite pissed, and I probably wasn’t far behind him.… READ MORE.... …