It's what's inside that counts

Save the wrapping paper, save the world

Climate is changing. Resources are not inexhaustible. There will be generations after ours, and we have to leave them an inhabitable earth.

We therefore reuse the wrapping paper of our Christmas presents. The presents are opened carefully using a pair of scissors in order not to tear the paper. The paper is then solemnly folded and carefully and put in bags (mentally marked “good conscience”) and stored for reuse the following year.

 We are a large family and for Christmas we were 16 people. The average taking must have been around 15 presents for everyone. Every present is opened carefully, passed around to be admired and added to the receivers’ stack of presents. Many of them will be probably be put aside never to be looked at again.

My brother-in-law apparently was getting a bit upset with the slow progress, the prospect of the exercise having to be adjourned in order to be continued the following day – which seems to have become our private Christmas tradition - and the general overabundance of socks (after all you only have two feet).

He was in such a hurry to get on with the unpacking that he tore the paper. I looked at him disapprovingly.

- Oh! Come on, he retorted.

- This is like flying supersonic from Europe to New York to go out for an evening meal. Walking two blocks from the hotel to the restaurant to save fuel, and then look deridingly at people arriving from their New York home in a taxi.

Secretly I tend to agree with him. The less wrapping paper that is used again, the better for the world. That is, if new wrapping paper is not used instead.

 

Four Vegetarians and a Muslim for Xmas

It has been confirmed. The guest list for Christmas includes four vegetarians and a Muslim. The family is growing. The young ones have chosen their own ways of life, and some have found their partners for life outside the social circles of their parents.

 

We have all been together before. And we have had a fine time together. Our own diet has already changed over the years. Cutting back on meat - even a couple of days every week with vegetarian meals. No problem – well, no BIG problem. 

But Christmas Dinner! Traditions rule when it comes to celebrating Christmas. Roast duck or roast pork is tradition. Quorn and tofu is found nowhere in the Holiday recipes passed on by the Grannies. Pork was a predominant nutritional element in my own family’s many days of Christmas feasting. Alcoholic brewerages were by no way banned.

 

Well, anyway. Christmas should maybe not only be about eating and drinking. The table is as much the people around it as the food upon it. So let’s celebrate family and friendship. Old traditions die, new traditions are born.

 

The other night, In an absurd dream, I saw myself outside the church, waiting for people to come out after the mass. Finally my wife is there. What’s the news? I ask. “It's a boy, and his is a vegetarian”, she said.

So, COEXIST AND EAT WHAT'S ON YOUR PLATE.

Men Multitasking (with eyes closed)

Life is not was it was. Especially not, if you are a male.

Our contribution to childcare, cleaning and cooking has increased tremendously with the success of the women’s liberation movement. Fair enough, the couple should share the burdens of running the household.  And, admittedly, the women still do most of the work when it comes to shopping. What would the wardrobe look like without a woman in the house? And would there be one?

But there’s another reason for the increase in our burden.  The multitude of electronic appliances. Although many of them claim to be “intuitive”, only the cell phone and the credit card machine seem to be truly intuitive in the female sense of the word. The others are the man’s domain.

Try to think of the hours spent sorting out problems with computers, satellite receivers, the setting up of television sets, installation of game consoles etc. Add to this the maintenance of cars, often two in a household, and garden machinery. And of course the bigger houses we live in now. And we have, most of us, many more consumer goods than our parents had.

But all this has come at a price. We have less free time than our dads had.

We will have to start multitasking to cope. The women claim that they do that much better than we do. Maybe if we could learn it, someday it would again be politically correct to be man, and we would be accepted as equal partners.

I have started. Today I charged a phone AND a laptop, while AT THE SAME TIME having a nap on the couch.

I can’t wait to tell my wife.

 
PS: I shouldn’t have. And we will have been in our graves many years, before we will be politically correct, I should add.

Images in Words

Here is a quote from a great novel: She took out a picture of her daughter to show it to him. “No tell me what she looks like in words” he said. (From To the End of the Land, written by David Grossman).
 

How do you render in words what is depicted in lines and colours? It isn't easy, is it? Pictures don't say anything, the show something.
 

There is no exact verbalisation. A computer programme could perhaps convert a picture into other forms of data – splitting it into millions of pixels, each of them with a specific mixture of cyan, magenta and yellow. But it would not give any meaning – unless for another computer, which could recreate it as an exact copy of the original.
 

A description of a picture would be different for every person who made the attempt. It would to some degree convey the attitude and feelings of the one making the attempt. It might be a faithful, reproduction – but not an exact one.
 

Can words convey things that an image cannot? Something more than a precise mechanical representation? Something with a human touch to it?
 

And in the opposite direction. Words into images. You read a book, and in your mind you translate the words into pictures of characters, landscapes and situations. Different pictures for every reader.


I remember visiting an old castle. I looked at one of the paintings on a wall. A strange landscape and strange animals. Some big grey animals with a long peculiar nose, some spotted animals with a long neck. They looked like nothing I had seen before. I realised that it was a very old painting, probably painted on the basis of a verbal description by someone who had been in Africa.
 

If a story is made into a film, the pictures will already have been created for you. And they are the same for everyone.
 

Pictures of the Prophet Muhammad are not allowed. There must be billions of them in the minds of the believers.

 

 

Don't eat it, it's German!

I was born in Denmark and grew up in Denmark.

 

It was only a few years after the German occupation of the country.  In school we were lead to understand that Germany equalled marching, discipline and blind obedience of orders. After the War many people took great care to show that they did not like the Germans. Maybe they had neglected doing it during the war. After all, it could be very dangerous. Some of the dogs were even taught not to eat the lump of sugar at their feet, if told that it was “German”.

England, on the other hand, represented humour, humanity, nobleness, chivalry and in general everything good in this world.

This was the general view which my generation grew up with.

There was one person, however, who never said anything negative about the Germans. It was my father.  He had been in the resistance during the war, fighting the Nazis. He had shown his attitude during the war, and therefore felt no great need after the war to show that he was on the right side.

Fortunately you grow wiser with age. I have had the opportunity to get to know Germany and the Germans better.  I have realised that they are just like the rest of us. Would we have had the bravery to react differently from them under the same circumstances?

Kennedy said he was "ein Berliner". We are all Germans.

 

NB! As for our "free" choice of allegiances in times of war and occupation I can warmly recommend Sofi Oksanen's novel Purge (takes place in Estonia).

Nationalists without Borders

When are we most nationalistic? Maybe when we are living abroad.  

When you meet with your fellow contrymen, you will soon start reminiscing about your home country. How everything worked more smoothly there. How the food was better. How the weather was better. How your own Church or religion is superior to that of your host country. How people at home were so much more open-minded and tolerant. 

You are happy to have an occasion to speak your own language, and you take much more care to do it correctly and without the use of foreign loan-words you would use at home. You even dig up the word for “fuck” that once existed in your own language before the globalisation of the English word. 

Maybe it is like that for everyone. A sort of protection against the foreign and unknown. 

I heard a talk with an Arab girl on the radio. Her parents had emigrated to Northern Europe. She was born there. She grew up in what can probably best be described as a “ghetto”. She had a strict upbringing. Muslim customs and morality were scrupulously adhered to. Muslim  food was prepared in accordance with all the old rituals. The children were protected from the loose morality of the youths of the new country.

As a teenager she had the opportunity to stay with relatives in her parents’ village for at period of time. To her surprise she found that life was much more relaxed there. Things were not so strict. The old way of life, which her parents had cultivated and cherished in their new country, no longer existed in the same form in the old country. 

Maybe our “colonies” abroad turn into museums of national virtues as surviving only in the memory of those of us, who did not witness the change. 

On the other hand, maybe this is not so bad as it sounds. When we go to our home country on holidays, we are no longer nationalistic. We then, fortunately, become international citizens with an understanding of the people of the world in their multitude. The nationalists are now those who stayed at home. Within their borders.