The tale of the silver cock-ring

DISCLAIMER: This blog post will have pictures of above mentioned piece of...er...attire, as well as general nudity. My belief is that if it’s acceptable at the Englischer Garten, there’s no reason for it to be banned from my blog. If you’re not into it don’t scroll down. You have been warned.

With that out of the way, and because it probably isn’t as clear as it should be, this blog post is about Easter. We spent our first German Easter in the most German way we knew how: by getting among a whole lot of naked people at the Englischer Garten.

What we’ve discovered – and rather rapidly – is that Germans (at least a good portion of the local Munich ones) love to get their kit off. They love being naked! Our first clue was a nearby Isar sandbank which fills with nude, overweight, leathery gentlemen on sunny days.

The second clue was our good friend Yuri (responsible for the whole picnic idea) who spent the planning stages exclaiming with unbridled glee that we’d be right near the naked people. THE NAKED PEOPLE! You know, people who’ll be NAKED! And that we should bring a volley ball because playing volleyball is fun. Oh and NAKED PEOPLE!

Finally there was the actual walk through the park...or, more accurately, the weaving and dodging of saggy body parts and the diverting-away of eyes. But aside from the fleshy environment, the atmosphere was lovely, the weather warm and the food and beer delicious (you’d better believe we smashed two buckets of KFC chicken).

Of course things did get a little strange...three in particular:

1. An elderly gentleman of about seventy took to parading around our section of the gardens wearing nothing but a silver cock-ring. Disturbingly, during every trip he took a few minutes to stand and lazily gaze around the area while fiddling with it. Casually. Slowly. Deliberately. Like he knew he had all the time in the world and there was nothing we could do to stop him.
2. A distinctively naked, distinctively pear-shaped middle-aged man decided to play soccer with two naked children of an uncomfortable age (that is about twelve or so). He leaped through the grass, setting his feminine butt cheeks a-jiggle and laughing as he tried to coerce the ball away from the youngsters. It was strange.
3. Closest to us was a rather large naked man. He had splayed himself out in the sun in the graceful manner of a walrus (if a walrus had two legs which it could spread out in order to let its ball-sack rest on the grass, I presume). There was nothing overly odd about this gentleman...until he whipped out a pipe – a proper wooden pipe – sat up and smoked it with the expression of a weathered sea captain. 

And now, to commemorate this most chocolaty of holidays, here are some pictures. Don’t click the link if you have an innocent mind which you don’t want tainted....otherwise, enjoy!

Read more »

To make Luke stop whining already

So yes, you’re quite right; I haven’t written in a really long time and I don’t have any really valid excuses. Call it a character flaw if you like.

The misfortune of my laziness is that I’ve missed some rather critical updates...and that has led to whingy emails from one Luke Cornish. Emails to the effect of “I was a little disappointed I didn't merit a blog post. Oh well, maybe I need to do more than travel 22 hours to come see you to get a shout out...”

Clearly things need to be set right. So, firstly, from now on I shall refer to Luke as The King of Guilt and Also Beer Consumption (he has a knack for drinking beer and staying relatively sober while I slip ungraciously into an unflattering, merry, kind of state).

Secondly, I’m going to give a somewhat accurate account of The King’s visit (which was, and continues to be, the highlight of my year thus far....that and the cock-ring man, but we’ll get to that later).

His Highness arrived at our place on a mild Saturday afternoon and pretty much immediately demanded that he be given beer and taken to watch a football game at a local establishment. The rest of the afternoon/night is a little hazy.

On to the next day...as it happened, the week of Luke’s visit fell on Starkbierfest. This delightful tradition was developed by the monks who founded Munich. They found that it was too hard to work the land during Lent without any sustenance, so they brewed a special strong beer that would provide them with what they needed and set out to get approval from the pope. Since the journey took so long, by the time the pope got around to sampling it, the brew had gone off. So he deemed it in the spirit of Lent (for who in their right mind would count that type of beer a pleasure?). From that time on for two to three weeks in April the people of Munich get drunk on one-litre steins of delicious beer in the name of the monks. I love that story.

Naturally we joined in with the tradition. And boy, let me tell you, there’s really nothing quite like sitting in a room with several hundred tipsy Germans in traditional dress, it is charming and delightful and everything nice.

The rest of Luke’s time was spent in a much more respectable manner – with sightseeing and being precious about the weather (which had turned slightly chilly).

Here he is at Marienplatz:

And here he’s enjoying the goods of the famous Hofbräuhaus:

And having a swing at the front of our place:

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”.

I have no words...

There are no words for this:



Thank you Heather for finding it for me.

If you don't watch this I'm going to be very mad

The guy who taught that dog to dance strikes again?

Today is a day for videos, everyone!

This one doesn't even require an explanation.

A serious discussion

I've spent the past ten minutes watching and re-watching this video. It's just that the more you watch it, the funnier it gets. Especially if you imagine that the first baby is pissed off at the second baby for trashing the house...and that both babies are drunk.

The Gift-Wrapping Fiasco of 2011

I firmly believe that there are few things in the world as dangerous as handing me a present and demanding it to be gift-wrapped.

In this I am the product of my parents.

My mother, while capable of all kinds of science-defying acts (like cleaning the bathroom and doing the shopping at the same time), subscribes to the theory that everything – no matter what shape it is – can be made to look like a lolly if you just put enough elbow grease into it. And my dad? Well, when I was two he dropped me and got a stick stuck in my eye, but since he was too afraid to pull it out himself he dragged me through the neighbourhood until my mother could de-branch me. What does that have to do with gift wrapping? Nothing really, but it’s my opinion that if you can’t pull a stick out from your kid’s eye, you probably can’t gift-wrap. Prove me wrong if you dare.

Despite these genes, I’ve somehow managed to make it to adulthood (and you realise this means a lot of Christmases, birthdays and a five year stint at Mather’s Shoes during which I had to wrap shoes for postage). But like every person with a severe disability, I’ve faced plenty of adversity: The Great Christmas Stereo Disaster of 1999, The Frying Pan Can’t Be Made Into A Lolly Shape Crisis of 2004 and The Accidentally Super-Glued Hand To Wrapping Paper Catastrophe (shortly followed by the Why Were You Using Superglue To Gift-Wrap ?! Inquisition).

Today I added another one to the record books when I took on the monumental task of gift-wrapping my goddaughter’s and her brother’s birthday presents (which I have to post tomorrow. Could someone please remind me?).

Luckily I was prevented from performing this task at the post office. That is, the post office staff sensed my intent to wrap five things inside their workplace and closed it before I had the chance to execute my plan.

Instead I took the pretty gift-wrap and the pretty presents home and spent the next hour and a half (HOUR AND A HALF!!!) making a complete mess of everything around me. When I was done, I had – for the first time in the history of our apartment – caused complete silence to fall over the room. Neither Simon nor Mark had ever seen a person so completely inept at performing such a basic task. I, on the other hand, beamed at having finished with five, distinguishably different and separate (because it doesn’t always work out that way) presents: two boxes, two misshaped – but nonetheless colourful – cowpats and a lolly.  If my family was by my side, they’d be applauding feverishly.

Of course tomorrow when the post office staff see what I’ve done I’ll probably be banned from buying wrapping paper in Germany, but tonight I drink to victory!