Borgen; 11 out of 10.

You can’t go past a good series of Danish TV. Not long ago we had ‘The Bridge’ and ‘The Killing’, which I believe was a Swedish-Danish Co-production. It was riveting TV watching and we were counting the days when it would be on again. The pepper-crackers would be out and the Stilton cheese with the Shiraz brought to room temperature together with my ear-phones. Those earphones were superfluous. The series were translated in English sub-titles but I wanted to hear the Danish language. Dutch and Danish are brother languages, (or sisters for the pc readers of this blog).

What makes these series so extraordinary is the ordinariness of it all. The prime minister lives in a modest house with the dishes piling up at an overflowing kitchen bench top, husband walking around in his singlet and their children wanting to eat Coco-pops for breakfast. She goes to work on a pushbike without wearing a helmet, and seems to have no security concerns. Husband of the PM and mother of their two children seem to have the best of a most normal of functional marriage. The odd thing is, in most of the Northern European governments, the Borgen treatment of PMs (and their royal families), it is not that far removed from reality.

The TV show apparently was difficult to obtain in the US with claims by competing commercial TV stations of piracy. I believe in California people can now see the series legally. It seems that the differences of political systems and the holders of power between the US and Denmark were seen as almost un-transferable in a TV series and, that at least in the US ‘normality of politics’ is hardly ever residing in a world of being ‘normal’. No president would go to the White-House on a bicycle and would probably have to go through numerous security cycles to just buy his wife a bunch of flowers.

The Danish TV drama shows how the PM can remain herself despite having risen to the highest office. She remains cool and normal and the series is not blown up in grandiosity like so many American dramas such as West-Wing, Homeland, and House of Cards. There are no lines of limousines or black-clad security lurking on roof tops with machine guns at the ready or hovering gun-ships overhead. No one is seen talking into their sleeves or wear Polaroid sunglasses.

The Danish way on thorny issues and legislations are resolved or passed with the parties sitting around the table sipping coffee and making sensible compromises within minutes. The Danes have a serious addiction to caffeine. What I would not give for our Australian politicians to behave like that!

We had just about given up on TV watching when Borgen rose up like Phoenix from ashes, none too late. The urgings of funeral insurances advertisements and the manic laughter of so many comedy trailers got us so depressed our intake of Stilton with Shiraz almost doubled. True, the Ancestry.com.au kept us going but soon waned when most of people restlessly searching for their ancestors ended up teary and overwrought when it was found out, their great, great, great, great grandfather had succumbed to whoring and a dose of the clap with blindness to dear Aunty Betty at birth in 1789 in Yorkshire to have been a result of all that.

We soon came to switching off the telly and just sat amongst the crackers and cheese, talked or did the after dinner washing up instead.  Not anymore now though. Another five days and Borgen will be on again.

There is hope for all of us now.

Go, buy some good cheese and watch “Borgen.”

First love and The Ford V8.

We all remember our first love. I certainly do. Her name was Marga. She lived opposite us at 104 Liguster Straat, The Hague. We were of equal age but she was much more advanced than I. I mean, I was getting the occasional twinge but staring at it I wondered what it was all about and did as yet not associate it with having anything to do with the opposite sex. The details are hazy and are of 60 years ago.

She had a broad smile and budding breasts which she implored me several times to touch.  She wasn’t asking it verbally. It was more the way she twirled around and did funny little hop-scotch things in front of me. She was most charming. I was too hesitant and shy but walking home afterwards for my dinner of mainly potatoes and mince, I regretted for not having done so. I made up my mind to do so next time. I was resolute. Yet, next time around, I again refrained. Why was that so?

I often wondered for the reason. It was at the time when my parents decided to give the three eldest boys sex instructions. We were given a few days notice of this monumental event and told not to play outside during the allocated hour or so when we would be informed of the important facts of life. I was the second eldest and had some rough idea of those facts already including that adults did some strange things together, but I had not as yet associated those ‘strange things’ as holding pleasure or joy. I thought it then as some aberration of mankind, seeing they had just bombed each other to smithereens during WW 2, nothing surprised me much at all.

Anyway, with Marga’s continuation with imploring me to touch her breasts and my parents’ well intentioned program to educate her sprouts with the basics, something stirred in me as well, none too late, and I finally touched her softness through her floral blouse. Hoorah. The sex education lesson at 5.30 pm (before the mince and spuds) was pathetic with my father being mainly silent and leaving it to his wife to address the main issue. The main issue being for my mother anyway was, to repeat several times; “whatever you do, keep your hands above the blankets, and don’t touch ‘it’!” Heaven only knows what she implored her husband to do or not to do, but she did have 6 children. Needless to say, I soon did nothing else but keep my hands under the blankets, relishing, rejoicing and reliving my recent bravery overcoming my reticence with the touch of the lovely softness of sweet Marga.

A few weeks after, I experienced an even more unforgettable and momentous event. We lived opposite each other on the third story of our block of apartments where we often used to see each other behind the windows. Holland bares their living space as nowhere else by hardly ever drawing curtains or blinds. One sultry summer evening, we, lovelorn, were looking at each other again across the street, when she lifted her blouse suddenly and utterly spontaneously, and with a smile, affording me a view of her small roseate breasts. Not only having touched them previously but now seeing them as well brought me almost to my knees. My lovely Marga. She soon moved away to Utrecht.

All these idyllic, romantic and sexual mores of my pre-teen years were rudely interrupted by my parent’s decision to migrate to Australia. What a schism. That suburb in Australia of single fenced off green painted fibro houses, empty streets and not person in sight, let alone a Marga. I could not share my loneliness no matter how lovely the rockeries or how well the suburban lawns were kept.

A great consolation was my first car. It was a 1950 Ford V8 single spinner and painted a light powder blue. That first time I brought it home after having traded in my Triumph ex police motor bike with side-car was a triumph. It was almost, but not quite as unforgettable as my memories of sweet Marga. Next morning, turning the key and pulling the starter knob it brought the eight cylinders to life with a roar that brought the whole street to attention.

It was this FordV8 car that I took my first Australian girl friend out in. I decided to show her the devastation of a small village named Woy Woy that had been blown to pieces by a huge swirling tornado  named ‘Willy Willy,’ an obscure aboriginal name . The Newspapers were full of the Willy Willy at Woy Woy. I could not shake the title of those headlines and had to find out what this devastation was all about.

The trip was a disaster even more than the Willy Willy at Woy Woy. She was nothing like my soft Marga. She was unrelentingly practical, hard as nails and tough as leather jackets. She complained of my car giving out blue smoke, also, “Get me a malted banana milkshake” she demanded. Late in the afternoon I dropped her off at Sydney’s Coogee. Her father was formidable, over 6 feet and wearing bib and brace overalls with tools hanging from a belt. He was most suspicious. He should not have worried.

No twinges of any sort.

Why do words lend themselves, at times, with associations totally removed from reality? You would never associate Kipfler with a potato; yet, I have no trouble in accepting he could have been a composer born in Leipzig, 1862. His mother thought he was a dear little boy and even at the age of two he already showed great promise when he started banging on his Blechtrommel. (Tin drum).

Gunter Grass has a timbre to his name that can only ever be associated with being a writer of words in a certain order. He wrote the Tin Drum. You would be hard pushed to respect a writer called ‘Essenfrescher’, would you?  Perhaps this is why in the world of the famous, especially movie-stars, names are sometimes perceived as hindering fame and are changed to a more appropriate sounding pseudo. I mean Boris Karloff could never have gotten there if he was called by his real name of William Pratt or Dean Martin as Dino Crocetti, Doris Day as Doris Kappelhoff.

Names can be fluid or grindingly rasping with associations far removed from what they stand for or are. I mean, I don’t think there are many still called Hitler. The telephone book in Germany or Austria reveals not a single person named Hitler anymore. Apparently his father did not like the sound of Schicklgruber and preferred Hitler. Even the name Schicklgruber is now rare, as is Goebbels etc.

So, what to make of words and names? Why is a name change perceived to add to possible achievements. If Bach was called Kohlrabi, would his music have found less acceptance? Who was it again with, “what’s in a name?” or, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare was destined to write brilliantly with a name like that. Mozart-Concert is so symbiotic in name. It had to happen.

Would Villa Lobos have written Bachianas if named Gauncho Pistachio? Who knows?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxzP1XPCGJE

However, after my nonsense, what seems that what ‘is’ counts most and not the given name. Hmm, I am not so sure.

I went to get my hair cut last week and when I was asked how I want it cut, I said to the girl; “I would like to look a bit more like Justin Bieber”. “Can you do that?” Why? She said, a bit bewildered looking. Much to H’s embarrassment, I sometimes act stupidly convincing. I made it worse by saying; “I want to be mobbed by teen-age girls again”.

( I was only ever shunned by teenage girls) I then realized that my joke didn’t get traction and I recanted somewhat by saying. “Only joking”, “please cut it any way you like, perhaps as it was eight weeks ago’.”  “ Please, go for it, you cut so well,” I smarmed while surrendering totally to her comb and scissors.

She took her revenge at the end of the cut by asking very loudly; “what about your eyebrows, shall I trim them ‘somewhat”. The sting was in the ‘somewhat’ indicating my eyebrows were so verdantly overgrown it was more in need of weed-killer. Ah, old age is advancing especially in ear hairs and brows. It made me repent my Bieber remark. For days I was sulking over it. H reckoned it served me right and was secretly gloating.

Even so, Justin Bieber’s name wasn’t a hindrance to his genius, was it? Mind you his fame might well be waning. He was booed a couple of nights ago. Those sort of fames based on talent quests are so fickle, they come and go like falling stars, they light the scene for a second and fall spectacularly down into darkness to be forgotten forever.

Still, I sometimes secretly wish for a light mobbing by hordes of screaming teenage girls, after all those years. Grow up Mr Oosterman, your eyebrows are showing. Keep clinging to your wreckage.