Oookay, let us have a teeny tiny sum up of the last two weeks. Starting with the good news, Joe has a job. It’s a big relief and I’m really happy about it, although I had to ask the big boss lady to shorten my shifts. The last two days my friend and I had a so-called trial at this restaurant in a holiday kinda town called Clarach. It’s basically a fish and chips shop – “The Great British takeaway”! The first day we went early and cleaned everything and then I did some work on the ice-cream kiosk. Yesterday they put me where the real deal is, haha – frying and preparing the food. We finished at 10pm and they showed us our shifts – from 12 noon till 10 in the evenings every day except Thursday. Let me make it clear that I didn’t mind that work at all – it’s pretty fun and time flies when there are customers, but because of my discopathy my back wouldn’t take all this pressure of standing up for 10 hours everyday. Plus I still need to study for my essays, so I asked if I could take the cleaning job in the morning for just 3 hours. I know it’s not 60 hours a week like it was initially, but I have no intention of risking my health any further. It might sounds stupid, or silly or whatever you wanna call it, but I’m actually a bit glad to discover that for me, money isn’t everything. I still need it, I’m very grateful I got this job, but my health comes first (selfish, selfish Joe).
Apart from that, everything else is fine. In fact, a lot of good things happened to me at once, out of nowhere, and I know that this is never a good sign, so I’m wary and waiting for karma to knock me out pretty soon. Hopefully it won’t, but I will still be waiting.
Now, the bad news is….. there are no new scribbles. My condolences to you! And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to explore the battles of the Somme!
Friday, July 29, 2011
…and tell me, please, oh, is this broken?
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Try to enjoy the battles of the Somme more than the participants did and see if you can find "All quiet on the Western Front". I'm sure that you'll appreciate the darkness of its theme. About five years ago I saw the film of the Somme which I believe was completed less than 2 months after the battle. The film had been restored by staff at the Imperial War Museum and it was accompanied by a specially commissioned musical score. No actual battle scenes since movie cameras were still pretty primitive in 1916 and the soldiers mostly looked cheerful. Will you studying Stalingrad next or maybe the fall of Berlin?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I have the movie, and kept wondering why they're so happy they're in a war. But anyway, I need to study just the Somme and the Schlieffen Plan for my essays. :]
ReplyDeleteYou certainly get some fun essays to write! I guess that the soldiers were smiling because because they weren't at the front and that they hadn't needed (yet) to die for their King (who just happened the Kaiser's first cousin). You get some reminders of the first world war in some odd places. For example, there is a neighborhood in Singapore with streets named Somme, Verdun, Petain etc. More bizarrely in Swakopmund (Nambia) there is a junction between von Moltke Strasse and Kaiser WilhelmStrasse. BTW, will you be working the Kaiser's withered arm into your essay?
ReplyDeleteI don't what documentary films were shot about Stalingrad although I doubt anybody would have been smiling. However, the Red Army photographers certainly took some dramatic photos. Antony Beevor's account is excellent and he relates the story of von Manstein's dachshund (a breed of dog that is ridiculous and disagreeable in equal measure). Well you wouldn't have expected a Prussian Feldmarschall to have much of a sense of humour but it turns out that he'd trained the dachshund (named Knirps) to raise his paw on the command, "Heil Hitler". Luckily for Knirps, von Manstein was not trapped in the Stalingrad Kessel with the starving 6th Army...