Harry Potter and the breast warts

Spring has arrived, which means that the streets of our part of town are now in bloom and the only thing stopping me from cartwheel-ing from place to place is the fact that I can’t. And that I’ve still got a loose grip on my sanity.

Although the recent burst of spring energy has caused an involuntary and irrepressible urge to storm the local book stores for material to read outdoors. Here’s the catch: German bookstores, German books. Evidently there is some neurological compound in my brain that equates sunlight with soaring ambitions.

This chemical imbalance caused Simon and I to each purchase a German version of the first Harry Potter Book: “Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen”.

And, loaded up on good intentions, buyers’ frenzy and elevated quantities of pollen we set up picnic near the Isar and started The Reading Phenomenon. That is to say, Simon ripped his shirt off with a fervency that showed he meant business while I communicated my intentions through my facial expression (Munich isn’t ready for what lies beneath my shirt – pork knuckles, knodles, beer and two buckets of KFC chicken) and we dove into our literature.

Surprisingly we found that we could follow the story. Nay, more than that, we were enjoying the story. We were flying through descriptions of wizards and cats and mean-spirited bitches. We were exhilarated...speeding through the text without any seatbelts on, at the heart-thumping pace of four pages an hour. (If this blog was a sitcom, you’d hear the sound of a vinyl record being abruptly stopped right about now).

Four pages an hour?! We are the Volvo drivers of the literary world. And here’s what I’ve discovered: it’s not that Volvo drivers want or even think they’re driving slowly. It’s just that there’s so much going on around – so many new adjectives, nouns and adverbs and so much stuff happening – that they actually think they’re going at a normal pace.

After a couple of trips to the Isar, we’re 20 pages in. The plan is to finish the entire Harry Potter series (in German) before our 96th birthday. So yeah, I might be MIA for a while longer...

In other important news: the German word for “nipples” is “Brustwarzen” which translates as “breast warts”.