Old friends and nuggets of new ideas

An old Ukrainian proverb says there’s only one thing better than making a new friend, and that’s keeping an old one.

Old friends aren’t necessarily only those who you went to college or grew up with. Having lived in Germany almost 12 years I’ve found some of my oldest friends here belong to an organisation I’ve been a member of almost as long: MELTA - Munich English Language Teachers’ Organisation.

Yesterday we met up at Gasteig for a day-long workshop, and it was great to catch up with so many fellow expats from Britain, America and Australia, even Zimbabwe. And when expats meet they love to talk! Not only about obvious things like hourly rates, who’s hiring who, and why it’s good to listen to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 - men like it too apparently! But also what it’s like, for example, bringing up children bilingually in Germany. It was interesting talking to fellow Brits with children of school age. Kids who all seem to answer their parents in German when spoken to in English. I worried for a moment about Matilda, but was reassured this is quite natural in bilingual families. Tower of Babel here we come.

The title of the training, before I forget, was “Ways to motivate and make them talk!“ and we were lucky to have a very experienced expat British teacher trainer from Salzburg guide us through a whole range of communicative methods. These ranged from games, songs, rhymes and raps and story telling to how to use the hilarious video “Rowan Atkinson in Hell“ in the classroom. I won’t be showing that particular clip in my nun-run school, but there was certainly plenty other material there to jazz up my lessons!

We came out looking like kittens licking cream off our lips. And looking forward to trying out some of these ideas in our classes – regardless whether we teach primary school kids or topdogs at Siemens.

And I also felt that for a few hours on a rainy Saturday in Munich I’d had a wonderfully welcome “fix“ of fellow native speakers and all things English to help me survive life in Lower Bavaria. The next big MELTA event won’t be till Christmas but I’m already longing to get in there again!

Know Howe for English: Being British in Bavaria ain't easy - Reason One

One thing I miss most about Britain is its daily newspapers.

Just before you missile me with mails saying I can find every single respectable British newspaper on line these days, let me just say, I know. I spend hours poring over www.telegraph.co.uk. I’m also fully aware of several outlets in Munich where you can pick up most quality British dailies on day of publication – albeit at almost thrice the original price.

The point is that I miss spreading my British newspapers over the breakfast table first thing in the morning to the accompanying whiff of freshly-brewed coffee and eat-out-of-bag croissants. Reading the news headlines online or in hard copy later in the day at rip-off prices just ain’t the same.

But ah, I hear you say, what’s wrong with an ex-pat Brit sipping his first cappuccino of the day over a German daily? Truth be told I’ve never been a fan of this country’s press. The “serious“ dailies like the Süddeutsche tend to be far too in-depth, hyper-convoluted and painstakingly long-winded with not even a hint of humour to lighten things up. Reports invariably run for several pages before-the-end-of-the-sentence verb appears, by which time anyone with a life to lead has usually lost interest and gone off to walk the dog. Then there are the ridiculously überparochial local papers, with headlines like „Traktor bleibt im Graben stecken. Feuerwehr rückt aus“ (Tractor gets stuck in ditch. Firebrigade to the rescue) or, even better, and I swear this is true, I read it in our local Hallertauer Zeitung just the other day: „Gestohlene Brieftasche taucht ohne Inhalte wieder auf“ (Stolen wallet resurfaces minus contents).

What all these newspapers lack is a sense of humour. Something which the British press is so good at. Take, for instance, the mountain of daily human-interest stories, with clever wordplay headlines that make you grin before you’ve even licked the first croissant flake off your lips. Today’s Daily Mail has a gorgeous headline: “Nuts! Woodpecker loses out in pecking order after cheeky squirrel steals his home.” OK, so it’s a non-news article. But faced with a choice between non-news nicely packaged and local news with too-logic-for-words headlines, I’ll take the cheeky British option, please.

The air ban across much of Europe has been lifted today. For many many souls - including Europeans stuck in far-flung exotic locations needing to return home a mighty relief of course. But for 5 or 6 days wasn't it nice to take a step back - rather than forwards for once. Someone on the radio today was talking about a "pause for thought", stopping to reflect on the hectic lives we lead.

How much we're at the mercy of nature though!