Germany

"Fussball Fieber herrscht in Deutschland!"

This is the measured opinion of the guy on ZDF last night, as he presented an article full of people with the colours of the German flag dyed in their hair and painted on their faces. Amateurs. Morons at home have been doing that for years, for all the good it's done. Even the fairly recent advent of flags for your car has done nothing for the fortunes of England, and many people's highlight of the tournament will be the sight of David Beckham throwing up before his free kick against Ecuador.

Anyway. I have been here on business for three days now, and am getting back into it. I am currently sat in an internet cafe in Karlsruhe in Germany, home of, well, not much really, but it is where the company we deal with at work live. I am here for a series of meetings and some actual work, too. That's fair enough - I'd be doing this kind of thing at home anyway, and it's a week where all my meals are paid for so I don't have to do any food shopping; this is becoming a serious imposition on my time, despite my earlier enthusiasm for cooking my own dinners. I am sick of my own cooking now, and want someone else to start doing it.

I had forgotten so much about living abroad. For example, the fine art of crossing the road. I spent a good two days after arriving , looking the wrong way every time I crossed a road. This kind of thing is hard-wired into our brains and is very difficult to change.

Similarly, saying "excuse me" when you walk into someone. It has happened a couple of times that, when bumbling into someone, my embarrased apology has been met with blank bewilderment. What should I be apologising for, they say. Well, in England we apologise when someone bumps into us, so I really can't help it. And for those English people reading (I say English because in my experience, Scots don't do it), who might be saying "Bollocks, I'm my own man and don't apologise to no-one for nuffink", I bet you do.

Queue jumping. I have seen it here before, but this is one of those things that is more percieved that true. Perceptions are powerful things, and tint our views in all sorts of odd ways. Germans are, I feel particularly ill-served by the Anglo-Saxon nations. We have several ready-made stereotypes which are far too tiresome and inaccurate to detail here, but I will say the one about them all being opium-wracked decadent Weimar-Republic throwbacks is my particular favourite.

In my experience, they simply do not listen to David Hasselhof, and find his belief that his concert at the Berlin Wall in 1988 was the main factor in the fall of the Wall a year later, mystifying. You can buy all sorts of foods that do not involve sausages. There is some truth in the idea that hey dress appalingly - socks with sandals are a regular sight, along with terrycloth trackie bottoms and orange short-sleeved shirts - but it must be remembered that, compared to the rest of North-Western Europe they are no worse than anyone else. The British, the Dutch and the Germans are the worst dressed societies in the world, and I can back this opinion up with as many fake statistics as you want. But having lived in Saarbruecken for nine months as a student surrounded by people who do nothing but work, and most recently spent a week in an office on an industrial estate with 200 of the quietest, most shy and retiring people you can ever imagine, the idea that they are all rude and loud and pushy is frankly laughable.

But it is, I think, easily the most durable. For example. I was at Stanstead Airport on Monday, and as usual, Ryanair's queueing system had broken down into anarchy. I found myself with a ticket to board first, but on the wrong side of the velvet rope between my batch of people and those who had to wait. And so, and I am ashamed of this, I slipped beneath the rope and basically cut the queue. I do feel I have some defence in this, as it was the queue I was supposed to be in, but this did not prepare me for what happened next. Anyone wanting a crash course in how the English deal with rule breakers, take note.

The person behind me started swearing, in lavish terms, about me. But not to me, to his girlfriend. I ignored it, as I already felt bad enough. But the it dawned on me - they thought that because I had pushed into the queu for a flight to Germany, I could only be German, and so genetically unable to queue. If I was German, the logic went, I would therefore be unable to understand English and they were free to swear at me. Swear at me to eachother, of course. This went on for some minutes as the ever-friendly and well-trained Ryanair ground staff ran about getting in eachother's way and doing everything bar let people onto the plane. Then, the piece de resistance.

The man turned to his girlfriend and said "You did German at school, how do you say 'Get out of the fucking queue, you German cunt?'"
"Erm..." she replied. There was a pause as she thought about it. I turned round and levelled a calm look at them, although inside I was alive with adrenaline at the thought that he could well hit me.
"Aus der Reihe, du detusches Foetze, " I began, "But you could have said it in English. I would have understood you perfectly well".

He looked terrified in a way that you only see on the face of someone who has been very rude about you in a language they are confident you cannot understand, but then finds out you can. And with that, he apologised to me as profusely as anyone has ever done, and we all boarded the plane.

All this is by way of coming round to my chosen subject for today, which is that some cultures are simply better at some things than others. This is not an original observation. Bill Bryson, not long after he'd moved back to the USA after twenty-odd years lving in Britain, was so taken with the idea of the post office holding an annual Customer Appreciation Day with free coffee and cakes that he wrote a three page article for the Mail on Sunday. And he has a point - the Royal Mail won't even provide you with a pen to fill in one of their many forms, let alone a free doughnut. However, he then told us how he made the dire oversight of posting a letter without a ZIP code only to have it come back three weeks later with an invoice for wasting USPS time. This wouldn't happen at home as I know from experience - when we moved from Devon to Leicestershire we told eveyone we knew our new address, but got the postcode wrong, and I mean really wrong. Wrong postal town, wrong district, eveything. Even now letters arrive with NN17 on them, despite the actual code being LE9. The point is, they arrive.

Anyway, I am not planning on talking about the post office for a whole blog posting (although I am determined to get maximum value out of my 2 of internet cafe time), but I am instead going to try and tackle at least one of those things which baffle us all, and that is understanding cultural difference. I am British. You may well have worked this out already, but I'm talking about more than just spelling colour with a U or driving on the left. What makes a culture is, in my opinion, a plethora of little things which point out the bigger things that, together, makes us into the English, Americans, Germans and so on. I can't speak for other European nations and I know absolutely nothing about the other Anglophone cultures of the world, so I won't try and make any incisive comments there. I'd end up making some baseless and sweeping statement and no-one would want to speak to me again. But I do know that as soon as it's not there, I start to miss the shipping forecast

The shipping forecast, for those who don't know, is a specialised weather forecast broadcast on Radio 4 first thing in the morning, just after lunch and last thing at night. It always begins the same way:

"There now follows the shipping forecast, issued at 1146 BST by the Met Office."

It then descends into what at first listen is a stream of abstract gibberish:

"Dogger, Malin Head, Fastnet fifteen to twenty, rising, medium to good. FitzRoy, Cromarty, Trafalgar, twenty to twenty-five, rising, good becoming meduim"

It goes on like this, through all twenty-six shipping areas around the British Isles, stretching from Norway to Iceland to Spain, in the same measured tones and sparse fashion. In fact, it is nothing but wind speeds, barometer readings and visibility. Anyone with a decent GPS guide could find all this out, and almost all ships do. Then it's the Archers. I'm sure if you look at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 you'll find an example.

But it's not really for the seafaring. It's for us. Bizarrely, the shipping forecast is one of the most popular things on British radio. People tune in especially to listen to it, people who live many miles form the sea. Millions hear it every day. People write long, affectionate books about it, and Blur's This Is A Low is based on it. If it is even suggested that it be changed even slightly, there is uproar and questions are asked in Parliament. Really, I'm not making that up. People write in to Radio 4 and complain if the broadcaster reads it too fast, too slowly, too seriously, too lightly. The 0048 broadcast even has its own theme song, Sailing By. Anyone British will know the names of at least a few areas.

Why? There is absolutely no sensible reason why this tiny programme, irrelevant to almost everyone that listens to it and ignored by those that it's for, should be so important to so many. I can't really account for a lot of thise people. But for me it serves as a reminder. I was born by the sea, grew up by the sea. Sheerness had a huge container port, a ferry to Holland and a fishing fleet. We got an RNLI lifeboat off of Blue Peter one year, and it has since done thousands of rescues, manned entirely by volunteers. For me, and I suppose hundreds of thousands like me, the sea is not some water next to the land that you swim in when it's warm. It is something else, something powerful, something romantic, something deeply important and to be respected. It's alive. Sheerness flooded in 1953 and again in 1978. Half the town worked on the docks when I was a kid, although fewer do now it's all been automated. Thanks to the amount of fruit that comes in through Sheerness, it is the only place in Britain that has wild scorpoins. They arrived in a consignment of bananas in 1960 and took up home in a disused church. They are still there.

And to hear this list of places, most of them nothing but water in the busiest shipping lane in the world, recited in a calm voice just before I go to bed, brings all this back to me. Home. I don't make a claim to native marine wisdom, but I know I see it for what it is. Part of me, bound up in where I am from and the times that made me. The place that made me. My uncle was a lifeboatman. We know the fear that he wasn't coming back. The thought of thousands of men over hundreds of years, setting out from Sheerness over the storms of the North Sea to whatever fate awaits them. Who knows? It has left a hell of a lot of widows over the years. Do not, I repeat, do not fuck with the sea. A lot of people, I think, will feel the same way.

Good night, and Good Luck
Dougal.