GeekLawyer’s Blog

Geeklawyer would like to wish all his readers well. He is enjoying his skiing holiday in Hintertux greatly. The only downside is that his chums are wage slaves and cannot therefore, unlike Geeklawyer, indulge themselves in arbitrary periods of holiday as the whim takes them. They will arrive next week and until they do the apre-ski is somewhat muted but nonetheless fun. Germans have this very peculiar habit of the pub ‘group sing-along’ where the entire pub rehearses a set repertoire of drinking songs.

These seem to involve odd and rather pointless rivalries between German towns: Berliners believe themselves to be the best while the Cologne types sing a song that expresses the inherent superiority of Cologne, its inhabitants and, above all, its ice hockey team. ‘Some things never change’ Geeklawyer thought to himself as he swigged his beer; it was just a shame they didn’t confine themselves to ice hockey partisanship 70 years ago: the Jews would have been grateful and the RAF would not have had to flatten Cologne - where was the Koln ice hockey team then eh?! No match for our boys. But of course it’s easy to be wise with the benefit of hindsight. Perhaps we should suggest to the American empire that rather than bombing their way round the world to introduce their corporate version of ‘democracy’ they should drop all that girly baseball & ‘it’s not-really’ football nonsense and adopt soccer as a mechanism of imperialism.

Geeklawyer has always joined in with the drinking songs of course, but for wicked fun drops in some appallingly offensive (to Germans) variants of the chorus where he can. For example one chorus line says, something like, ‘She heil-er’ (phonetically spelling obviously, fuck knows what it means). Geeklawyer’s version substitutes this with ‘Siege Heil’; they do sound oddly similar as it turns out. His German friends are invariably horrified. But the English ones usually think it jolly funny, and the German reaction funnier still. However the raised saluting arm is probably a bit much: but it hasn’t yet caused any fights: and he’s done it a lot.

On the whole Geeklawyer admires foreigners and has an abiding fondness for Germans in particular. Germans, it seems to him, regard the English in the manner of Spaniels: unconditional love and admiration and the more you kick them the harder they wag their tails and try to please. And if you try to speak their funny language to them they love you even more. Geeklawyer has recurring bouts of attempting to learn German but lacks the time (Ruthie claims to be fluent, but there is no objective proof of this and Geeklawyer thinks she may be bullshitting, as usual).

Geeklawyer concludes that it must be very strange not being English; but the people here do seem to cope with that remarkably well, albeit with a few occasional and understandable lapses.

Attached are two photos; one is the Tenne apre ski pub: venue of much drunken carousing: .

This photo gives the lie to Ruthie’s scandalous claim that Geeklawyer never skis but just walks up mountains and drinks Gluhwein in the mountain restaurant. The book is Barlow & Kings ‘Wills, Administration & Taxation‘ because Geeklawyer being a workaholic with an unimpeachable work ethic cannot entirely divorce himself from his career even while on holiday.