The trouble with haggis…

A few weeks ago I had a few friends round for food, wine and not a little madness. It was a kind of celebration for Scotland’s national poet, the incomparable Robert Burns, and so we ate haggis, tatties, oatcakes, and good Scotch broth…or rather, my middle European versions of them. There are some things you just can’t get in this part of the world, such as a swede. (No, not tall blond athletic Scandinavians, who are actually ten a penny here, but a vegetable not totally unlike a turnip.) And so I had to improvise with certain strange Germanic fruits of the soil, some of which I still don’t know by name.

The nationalities that arrived included Australians, (they get everywhere, apart from quite possibly Australia), English, Austrian, a solo Scot, and four Bulgarians. Yes four…put it down to drunken revelry on a late night underground train with a particular birthday celebrating woman. Anyway, I sent the invitations by email a few weeks before, only to discover that one of the eastern European ladies was somewhat confused by the word haggis as she believed it might be, not to put too fine a point on it, a sexual disease. It seems an innocent request that she attend a ‘haggis bash’ meant ‘please come over for tantric sex on the rug while I transmit a strange illness to you by the warmth of a roaring fire’, or something along those lines.

It would appear that there is hardly a word in any language that doesn’t mean sex in Bulgarian. Cabbage for instance, a green thing that inspires fear in young children all over the planet, apart perhaps from areas near Munich where it is looked upon as the food of the gods, has some weird connection with the losing of virginity in provincial Plovdiv. ‘I must go eat the lord of all vegetables, the cabbage, and maybe nibble a few princely sprouts as well’, is seen as an invitation to have a wild time in the back garden, and I don’t mean digging up a few carrots and trimming the roses, although now you come to mention it…but no. Let’s just prune that particular subject at the roots! It’s interesting that the most popular occupation in that part of Europe is the growing of green vegetables. (Ok, this is obviously untrue…but it might just be accurate.)

Of course, confusion over words can be a major problem the world over, especially if you’re an American. Citizens of the good ole’ US of A speak in a tongue unlike almost any other language, and yet in some distant form it is related to English. No, not the English found in certain parts of the UK, but more a third cousin twice removed, washed and placed in a spin drier, beaten with sticks, painted a garish colour, mixed with glue, thrown from a tall building, and then blown into a million pieces by high explosives before being put back together by a three year old with her eyes closed, sort of English. I can almost understand my stateside friends who were raised in a major city across the pond, but if they come, for example, from Kansas or Oregon, I might as well be listening to an Eskimo speaking Russian whilst playing the bagpipes.

Leaving English to one side, there are nations who demand the right to speak numerous languages, for example the Swiss, who not content with one have three or possibly four, depending not only on where you were born, but also on which way the latest referendum has gone, India, a country with more languages then people, and China, where there are so many symbols in their alphabet that some are still being discovered as we speak. At the last count Mandarin had 4,598 letters, 76 colours, twenty two birds and a small tree, but that may have changed radically in the few seconds it has taken to write this.

And then there’s style: no, not expensive shoes, silly hats and man-bags, but how different nationalities actually carry out a conversation. Let’s take the French, who can make a request that you stand on the right hand side of an escalator sound romantic, but only if you use an umbrella while listening to protect yourself from the spray that erupts from their Gallic mouths. Or Italians, who flail their arms so much in conversation that the energy they produce, if harnessed, would solve the world’s electricity problems in a trice.

Now, I have to state here, quite unequivocally, that I am no expert on language. I can barely speak my own, and anyone unfortunate enough to be in one of my classes when I taught for a period in Vienna, will probably have less understanding of English than the average member of the ‘Eastenders’ script writing team. However, I think it unlikely that any nation in the world could have as many words with sexual connotations as Bulgarian seems to have. Unless you count Iceland, where the weather is so severe that every sentence includes an invitation to ‘sit by a volcano and examine each other’s glacial heights’, or certain parts of Germany, where the wearing of lederhosen has made sex such an impossibility that people are left to simply imagine what the act might be. It also probably explains Wagner and the Ring Cycle. (Well, something has to!)

Which brings us back to Bulgarian. Today, believe it or not, is Valentine’s Day, a day beloved of card, chocolate, and cuddly toy manufacturers the western world over. But not in the frozen wastes of the Balkans, where a short time after the villagers have completed the daily routine of potato counting and sheep measuring, the sleepy inhabitants will be in a state of high excitement for quite another reason. It is St. Triphon’s Day, the Day of Wine and Love, where every true citizen takes it upon himself, or herself of course, to rush to the cellars, drink of the vine and then find somebody to have a drunken fling with amongst the empty cabernet casks.

So, perhaps it’s not sex, but love, (with a little grape juice thrown in), that Bulgarian language and tradition bring to our party, for if we were all to honour St. Triphon on February 14^th the world might just be a better place. On the other hand, why not celebrate and practice the fine arts of viticulture and the heart each minute of every hour instead of on a single grey day in mid-winter? I have to admit that I need much more practice in one of these skills than I do of the other, but I am loath to say which. Suffice to tell, the bottles are lined up in my cosy room. Would anyone care to join me? I even have my own bottle opener!

Let us not to the marriage of two minds…

A long time ago, when the world was just a little younger than it is now, and I had only one or two grey hairs and far fewer lines under my eyes, I met someone, a woman from Norway…but you’ve heard all this before, It’s over now, fifteen years of a Scandinavian dream that turned slowly into a Norse hell. I’m still trying to work out why…but I doubt I’ll ever really know. No, the real question has to be why she dropped me in the nearest waste bin and decided to pair up with…

Just for a change I am sitting in a favourite haunt of mine in Bratislava. A light lunch of coffee and Slovakian salad, and I search the eyes of fellow diners for signs of light. Monday morning is much the same everywhere, each face a calendar for the week showing day number one, and with freedom too many long hours away.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Slovak women are a delight, and I don’t simply mean the young and foolish. Oh, of course fast food and a lack of exercise is taking its toll, and the rotund are becoming more prevalent, but there is a certain something that suggests true beauty…the same, I think, can be said of Bulgarians, (who are far more dangerous), and the very occasional Austrian, (who are far more…Austrian). Perhaps it’s a central and eastern European thing.

I am here to escape Vienna, work, and life, if only for an hour or three. It was brought to my notice a few days ago that my now ex-wife has become engaged to a serial divorcee, and the news hit me rather harder than it should have. It seems an astonishing choice, and even without this male creature’s changeable nature, it is a difficult thing for me to come to terms with. I met him perhaps once or twice, but he was so utterly invisible that I struggle to see his face. I think he was just about capable of speech, or at least the occasional grunt may have passed his lips. I am unable to answer the question of why a seemingly intelligent woman would give up all hope and align herself with a man who if he had one more brain cell would have doubled his present quota. Do I sound bitter? Damn, and I was trying so hard not to. Failed again. C’est la vie…

The trouble with broken love affairs is that you can easily lose your faith in the people around you. One girl betrays you and your muddled brain begins to think, ‘hang on, if the love of my life can use me as an ash tray, what will all the others, the people I may yet fall in love with, do when they get restless?’ Of course, just because my (ex) wife seems to have bashed her head on a crash helmet once or twice too often and cannot understand what she has lost, it doesn’t mean everyone is like that. Or does it?

I have a friend: let’s call him Brian for want of a better name. He would have us believe that we are not meant to be monogamous. But then Brian, (yes, that really is his name, but don’t tell him I told you as he prefers to think of himself as Sigmund, or even possibly Carl, for reasons too obscure to go into here), lives a solo life in a mountain cabin, thinking deeply about Nabokov, occasionally venturing into the big city to ply his trade as writer/actor/teacher, stare longingly at women between the ages of about 18 and 49, drink two glasses of wine and then slide gracefully under the table.  I love him dearly, but he is an Australian after all, and so how can I take his thoughts on the nature of love, trust and the male middle age crisis seriously? And I pair the words love and trust carefully, for without one, you cannot have the other.

As Chet Baker once sang, I fall in love too easily, I fall in love too fast, but now I think I’d rather not get involved in the whole sorry business again. I want laughter and just a little hope, not tears and a lack of faith in the entire human race, which is what I think I suffer from now. There should be a word or words for it…maybe there are.  I am an unbeliever, a relationship agnostic, or perhaps even a love atheist. Is this really possible? And yet…

I went to a jazz club last night, Porgy and Bess in Vienna, a place I have grown fond of over the past months. There was a trio of Danish singer, Norwegian pianist, and Swedish double bass player, performing. As they began to play I had no real idea what to expect, but the opening notes from keyboard and strings were so achingly beautiful that you could not fail to be moved. If there is need then this was it, and I fell in love again, but this time with the music.

I was there on my own, although the plan had originally been to be with company, but because of Natalie Portman, a late starting film, a Romanian training to become Big Brother, (a long story), and because I’m a rambling idiot, (a very short story), I was alone, and, funnily enough, I found I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to share the moment, or perhaps moments, with someone, but…and so, in between the notes, I glanced around, hoping that this particular someone was there. But she, whoever she is, didn’t arrive, or if she did, we did not find each other after our eyes met while the songstress sang of broken dreams. Or even trip over each other’s feet ending up in a heap in the darkness amongst half empty wine glasses and an untouched strawberry mousse, which I think would be much more likely if I’m involved.

And there’s the problem, to be or not to be single, and do we actually have a choice in the matter? And if we have a choice, can we phone a friend for advice or ask the audience. Life is rather too complicated at times, and if you listen to a little music at the right time, or read some words by Chekhov or Shakespeare late in the evening, it may become blindingly clear, staggeringly unclear, or sometimes even both, and I’m still not sure which I prefer.

One thing I do know, without the right company, (and possibly a decent Pinot Noir), the rest is silence. And so I shall look out two glasses along with that souvenir corkscrew from Ulan Bator, (I knew it would come in useful), and spend a little time investigating my CD collection. I shall then simply wait and see. You never can tell…