Woof !

After four months into this island adventure I have to owe up to my unremitting ignorance concerning the ins and outs of the UK education system. In my defense it should be mentioned, however, that there seem to be more outs than ins.

For one, it is rather unlikely that a first attempt at entering an educational institution in this country will be successful. When trying to place a child, so called catchment areas for state schools must to be considered.

However, living in one of these areas does not automatically grant a child access into one of these schools. In fact, we were told that London parents run off to secure a place for their child on the day of her or his birth. Now that’s a bonding parent!

However, as will be made clear to parent and child, remaining at a decent state school will depend on a series of drawn out tests and examinations starting at the age of seven.

Here is another little island fact: girls take secondary school entrance exams at eleven years of age but not so boys. For some reason only obvious to Brits, boys take the exam at thirteen, which by the way is also the last possible date to get accepted into secondary school it seems. I am not kidding. It’s 11, 13, or tough luck folks.

I virtually was told that moving to England with a child older than 14 at the most is a really bad idea since no ‘reputable’ school would want to ‘run the risk’ of taking in a...well, they didn’t outright say stray dog, but somehow I think that’s what they meant.

“Forget injuries never forget kindness.”
Confucius

Not Bread Enough!

That Brits have the worst food in the world is most certainly a thing of the past. Restaurants, grocery stores, and cook books have adeptly incorporated tastes and dishes from culinary hot spots around the world.

In fact, grocery stores everywhere abound in a large variety of veggies and sauces from Asia. And get this -- and you won’t hear that very often from a German -- they tend to have a larger assortment of breads than one would find in Germany.

Everything from baguette, scones, to whole wheat, potatoe farls, stone-oven baked artisan breads, and focaccia is available, even dark German Vollkorn and Swedish crisp breads.

Yet, despite this variety there is not one kind of bread that is outright pallet meltingly delicious.

I feel truly bad to say this. It’s like a beauty contest, where everything is being done to prove that Dominicans can be blonde, too, and the judges just raise their overly arched eyebrows and say: “Not blonde enough!”

Adaptations

Shortly after arriving on this off shore shoal in the North Sea, I wrote a post in which I went on and on about the blessings of a strong middle class and how I had miraculously landed in the bosom of one of its last remaining outposts.

Well, I must have been too tired to keep my eyes open and/or my brain sufficiently nourished when I was writing this or maybe I was simply blinded by all the flashy two- seaters speeding past.

While we may indeed live in a middle class neighborhood, everyone around us is trying to be anything but that. Just everywhere else, the middle class is under such pressure it seems that nobody likes to remain in it, if they can help it. People do everything to move up and out before it implodes and all that’s left will be a couple of bent Volvo hubcaps.

And by that I mean virtually anything. At times it borders on the obscene, especially with parents and their children. From day one in a child’s life all energy is spent on positioning her or him for the big run up the ladder.

Local magazines abound in advertisement for elite preschools, extra-curricular this and that, and distinguished ‘independent’ (i.e., private schools) including training sessions on how to get into one of them. And sadly, parents buy into all this (not just the magazines).

They virtually inhale what they hear, see, or read and with it also the smelly old school us-against-them mentality.

I am not much of a flag swinging socialist but this here has the metallic smell of New Age Darwinism. Funny enough, Darwin said that it’s not the strongest or the smartest who will make the cut “but the ones who are most adaptable.”

So, maybe it’s time to relax and wait until the last one drops dead. It’s too bad for the kids, though. But maybe they’ll learn to adapt as well. The question is...to what.

No such thing?

I remember the sensation of surprise and disbelief when my otherwise quite capable English teacher returned to me one of my papers with the remark, “There is no such thing as self-deception!”

In one respect she was, of course, right since the word ‘self-deception’ does not exist in English, but that wasn’t her point.

I had translated the German concept of a so-called ‘life-lie’ (Lebenslüge), as ‘self-deception’ in an effort to describe the human tendency to protect one’s peace of mind in the face of adversity.

My teacher insisted, however, that the word self-deception was illogical because it implies a subject and an object in the same person.

Maybe I would have faired better had I proffered more sophisticated terminology like “delusional disorder” borrowed from the abundant chest of treasures of the human psyche. But I wasn’t looking for the extraordinary. In fact, I was trying to describe a very ordinary state of mind.

In post-Nazi Germany one very common ‘Lebenslüge’ was, “I didn’t know that my neighbor was killed by the Nazis, I just took over his store.”

‘Lebenslügen’ can be inconsequential but sometimes they are outright criminal. Either way they are adopted to avoid unpleasant truths. They make one’s life a little easier. They are a common coping mechanism. But like all lies, they usually come back to haunt us in the end.

To this day, I find that English is just a tad bit poorer (and maybe less honest) for its inability to provide or simply adopt a term like ‘Lebenslüge’.

A person can be self-delusional or she can be in denial but neither expression captures the subtle as well as sinister state of mind implied in the German word ‘Lebenslüge’.

But then, language always changes and so do cultures. ‘Schadenfreude’, a German term describing an equally unattractive human quality (i.e., the rejoicing in someone else’s misfortune), has made it into English almost unscathed.

‘Lebenslüge’ should be a close runner-up. After all, just take a look around, it’s everywhere in this best of all possible worlds.

Have you noticed...?

It takes some people a lifetime to get to know themselves, most need longer.