Das Wunder von Bern

 

 

The 1954 FIFA World Cup Final is often listed as one of the greatest matches in World Cup history, and also one of its most unexpected upsets. In Germany, it has become known as "Das Wunder von Bern" (The Miracle of Bern).

The game was played at the Wankdorf Stadium in Bern, Switzerland, on 4 July 1954, and saw West Germany beat the heavily favoured Golden Team of Hungary - also known as the "Mighty Magyars" - 3–2.

 

 

The unexpected win evoked a wave of euphoria throughout Germany, which suffered from a lack of international recognition in the aftermath of World War II. It was the first time since the Second World War that the German national anthem was played at a global sporting event.

 

To watch cuts from the real television broadcast, click here and here

 

I was there, an eight-year-old boy in a huge crowd, watching it on a small black-and-white television set left running for the occasion - but without sound - behind the window of a radio and television shop (it was a Sunday and all the shops were supposed to be closed). When the final whistle blew, we all hugged each other with tears in our eyes.

Some publicists described the 1954 victory as a turning point in post-war German history, notably Arthur Heinrich and Joachim Fest. In Fest's words: "It was a kind of liberation for the Germans from all the things that weighed down upon them after the Second World War ... July 4, 1954 is in certain aspects the founding day of the German Republic."

Something to remember on this day a whole seventy years later.

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In America no man is above the law - unless you're the President

 

If the ruler of a country is immune from prosecution for any acts he (or she or it) committed in his (or her or its) offical capacity, how could the Americans persecute so many leaders of other nations?

Having now set this insane precedent for themselves and the rest of the world, the American presidential election seems to have become a lay down misère and Trump romps back in again - unless the Biden team uses a rather unconventional method of carrying out his assassination (for which Biden could not be held responsible) by hiring an actor to pose as Vladimir Putin who would tell Trump that he no longer loves him. Trump would immediately die of a broken heart. Problem solved!

Should he survive, Trump should immediately break the left's ridiculous gender ideology and denial of biological reality by identifying as a woman. The left would have to either admit the absurdity of their gender ideology or accept and celebrate "Donna Trump" as the first woman President, thus beating Hillary, Liz Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. Furthermore, if he remained married to Melania, he would also be the first gay president and the first Lesbian president, thus making even the Democrats happy.

Don't thank me for this but a friend in Cooktown. It must be the heat!

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"A weekly campaign report for your property is now ready to be downloaded."

View online advertisement here

 

Nothing much has happened except for another two or three price inquiries to which I replied, after which I never heard anything more. It seems people simply can't extrapolate from a Valuer-General's assessment of the land value alone of $2,637,000 two years ago and today's selling price with all the improvements.

Of course, there were a couple of chancers, like the two women who came down from Canberra with the idea of wanting to start an eco-tourism business on the seven acres along the river. They told me they'd even been to Council. I thought I send them the clip from "The Castle" but in the end I didn't even bother to tell them that they're dreamin'.

 

 

And so we continue to pick up branches and cut the grass - which grows mercifully slow in winter - and do a bit of boat-spotting, always on the assumption that Nietzsche (pronounced as in 'I Nietzsche more than ever!') was right with his "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger".

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The Road to Little Dribbling

 

Click on Watch on YouTube to watch the video

 

Perhaps I became an Anglophile because I grew up in the British Occupied Zone of post-war West Germany where the little Tommy kids joined us in our tobogganing with their frost-bitten knees sticking pitifully out from their khaki shorts. We had not much to wear either in war-ravaged Germany but at least we had the good sense of wearing full-length albeit badly patched long trousers.

All my favourite travel writers are dead now, but of the living ones, Bill Bryson, now living in the U.K., is without argument by far the best (on second thoughts, Paul Theroux may still beat him by a whisker). His "Neither Here Nor There", "Notes from a Big Country", "Down Under", and "Notes from a Small Island" - click here - are total delights to read.

If you have read "Notes from a Small Island", you simply must read its sequel "The Road to Little Dribbling", written twenty years later after he made a brand-new journey around Britain to see what had changed.

 

Read a preview here

 

Once again, with his matchless homing instinct for the funniest and quirkiest, his unerring eye for the idiotic, the endearing, the ridiculous and the scandalous, Bryson gives us an acute and perceptive insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.

 

 

Having read and enjoyed the book, I'm thinking of now also buying the audiobook to listen to in bed on a cold and wintry night at "Riverbend".

 

Click also here

 

Why think? It's done! Fourteen hours of listening pleasure awaits me.

 

 

When you're hot, you're hot, and so I have also ordered Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue", "Notes from a Small Island", and "Sunburnt Country".

 

 

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Six years ago to the day

All trussed up and ready to go under the knife

 

Very early in 2018 I developed a slowly growing lump on the left side of my neck. Not being one to rush to a doctor unless it's a matter of life and death, I left it unattended, thinking that it may go away.

However, owing to a long history of melanomas from my many years spent in the tropics at a time when skin cancer had not yet even entered the vocabulary, I had in recent years been booked in for six-monthly appointments with Dr McCrossin, a dermatologist from Nowra who regularly visits our area.

April was my next appointment when I pointed out to him this neck growth. He immediately tried to book me in with a local GP in the Batemans Bay Medical Centre where he was seeing me but, of course, no booking could be made for some weeks. I therefore went across to a bulk-billing practitioner, Dr Yong-Xin Shi, who arranged for an Ultra-sound which confirmed an unusual growth requiring more investigation.

A fine-needle biopsy in early May confirmed a well-differentiated keratinised SCC, following which Dr Shi wanted to send me for a chest x-ray. A chest x-ray for something growing on my neck?

By this time I could get an appointment at the Bateman Bay Medical Centre where a Dr Jayanta Kar gave me an urgent referral to Dr Tack-Tsiew Lee in Canberra, a head and neck surgeon, whose receptionist put me on a long waiting list which would have meant that I wouldn't be seen until perhaps June or July 2019. However, a week or two later, I had an urgent call to say that this was not a simple operation but the big 'C' - 'cancer' - and that Dr Tack-Tsiew Lee couldn't handle it anyway.

In desperation I phoned my dermatologist in Nowra, Dr MacCrossin, who squeezed me in at the very last minute for a consultation with a visiting surgeon from Sydney, Dr Kerwin Shannon, who saw me on the 25th, stuck a camera up my nose and down my throat, and confirmed "Urgent action required", but it wasn't until mid-June that I went for a PET scan in Wollongong, after which I heard nothing more.

It seemed I had dropped off the system, and I had to phone Dr Shannon's office twice before I was told that I should come to the Lifehouse in Sydney, a hospital specialising in cancer treatment, for a consultation on the 26th of June with a view to undergoing surgery.

At the Lifehouse, Dr Shannon, a Professor Milross, and a Professor Clark, agreed that I needed urgent surgery but in the same breath told me that there was no slot available for the complicated robotic surgery.

Almost halfway home again, I received another call to say that a slot had become available and could I return for an operation on 3 July?

Back at the Lifehouse, I signed all sorts of waivers which meant if they botched this one up and yet I should survive, I couldn't blame anyone but myself, in addition to which I had to hand over my cash contribution of $11,800 plus swipe my private health insurance card to cover the $3,000 a day at the hospital - which ultimately added up to nine days.

 

 

The following morning, they trussed me up and wheeled me into the operating theatre - "See you on the other side!" chortled Cate, the good-looking surgical assistant, with some ambiguity - , knocked me out, and Professor Clark did the robotic surgery and selective neck dissection.

I don't remember a thing but Padma tells me it took them seven hours, after which they wheeled me into the Intensive Care Unit for a night before I ended up in my hotel-like private room with a feeding tube sticking out of my nose and other catheters hanging out from other parts of my much diminished body.

 

 

There isn't much to say about the next six days and night (other than that I would have preferred to be somewhere else), during which I was fed with liquid pain killers every six hours plus some liquid food (can you see me making air quotes around the word 'food'?) The feeding tube was removed on the 9th of July and I was allowed to mingle in the foyer with fellow-patients and the hospital's volunteer-dog.

 

 

I was discharged on the 12th of July 2018 with the following summary:

"Mr Goerman underwent transoral robotic resection of left tongue base and selective neck dissection on 03.07.18 for left gongue base p16+ SCC T2 N1. There were no complications and Mr Goerman had routine admission to ICU for immediate post operative management. He received IV Augmentin for 1 week, and diet was upgraded whilst on NG feeds. NG tube was removed on the 9th July and ongoing speech therapy review for swallow exercises were completed. Mr Goerman was deemed safe for discharge home on 12th July with plans for follow up."

Those "follow-ups" were six weeks of intensive radio therapy, of which more later, and three-monthly, and now six-monthly PET scans, which suggests that I may yet reach my statistical life span of 83.2 years.

Unkraut vergeht nicht!

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Rest in Peace, John Burke!

 

John Burke in the centre of the photo and I at the ANZ Banking Group Retired Officers' Club's Christmans lunch at the ANZ Bank Head Office in Martin Place in December 2010

 

Walk a mile in someone else's shoes, they say, but how can you even begin to do that when that someone spends three days a week hooked up to a dialysis machine? How can you even imagine what that feels like unless you've gone through the same agony?

When John Burke wanted to divert himself from his dialysis sessions which he had to undergo three times a week to stay alive, he found in me a willing listener when he phoned me several times, on some days as often as five times. But there were occasions when I was elsewhere on the property, and I would arrive back at the house totally out of breath, only to find John at the other end again, wisecracking or wanting to reminisce about our time together at the ANZ Bank almost sixty years ago. I knew it helped him break up the tedium of removing unwanted waste from his blood, but it got mine boiling at times which is why I asked him to limit his calls to perhaps just two a day. Unwisely, as it turned out, because he took it badly and I never heard from him again.

Until yesterday when I received this email from another retired ANZer:

 

Evening Peter, Not sure if you have currently been in touch with John Bourke, not been well last few years but we have just been advised that he died on 25th June. Don’t know any funeral details yet but should be available shortly. Regards Noel

 

John Burke, as head-ledgerkeeper at the ANZ Bank in Canberra Civic, had been my immediate boss during my first two years as ledgerkeeper from 1965 to 1967 during which we were also "inmates" in the same boarding-house. He was again my boss as accountant of the Kingston branch where I worked as a teller for another nine months or so after I had come back from South Africa and before I went to New Guinea.

We met again after over forty years at the ANZ Banking Group Retired Officers' Club's Christmas lunch in 2010, followed by several meetings at my old watering hole, the Blues Point Hotel in McMahons Point, and the nearby Kirribilli Club, and continued to stay in touch by telephone until that fateful out-of-breath call after which I never heard from him again. How I now wished that I had held my breath instead of being out of it!

 

 

Rest in Peace, John! You have left your mark on my life, and there'll always be a place on the South Coast where you will be remembered!

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No introduction needed: Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

 

What a trifecta: the online book - click here - , the above video clips, and you can scroll down to five recordings of the audiobook "Notes from a Small Island" by clicking here (there's a whole hour's worth of recordings and I promise you, you'll love them!)

Of course, I bought and read the book a long time ago, and more recently I also bought the audiobook - and so can you: click here.

 

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Last Cab to Darwin

 

 

There was a time when we aspiring males would bond over stories of how many beers we could scull without falling over. Some sixty years later, the same but now expiring males bond over stories of the number of pills they take. Some of them even have those monthly pill organisers featuring 31 containers sitting in the centre of the lounge room table as a kind of status symbol.

 

 

This male bonding took an unexpected turn the other day when over a cup of coffee - of course! - and scones with jam and cream the almost unspellable and hitherto unpronouncable word "euthanasia" cropped up in the conversation, those Greek words "eu-" as in "well" and "thanatos" as in "death" both neatly packaged into an almost sweet-sounding word.

Even though another German had already dealt with it - "A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death" (Friedrich Nietzsche) - I hadn't given it much thought; instead, I practise my own "youthanasia" with a steady diet of books which, if nothing else, keeps at least my mind young.

All I could offer to the discussion was to tell them to go to YouTube and watch Michael Caton (remember him in "The Castle"?) in "Last Cab to Darwin". Watch it before it's too late --- by which I mean, I swear it, before YouTube deletes this full-length movie for copyright reasons.

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The Perfect Wife

VINNIES' bookshelves

 

I don't usually read unbelievable fairy tales but there it was staring me in the face at the local op-shop: "The Perfect Wife" by a JP Delaney of unknown gender. "Should I buy it?" I asked Padma. "Don't bother to buy it", she said, "I wrote it!" And so I didn't.

 

Read the book online here

 

But I picked up three other beauties: a critical study of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" edited by Paul B. Armstrong; David Marr's "Panic"; and a beautiful hardcover edition in almost mint condition of Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling" which I had bought as a paperback only some months earlier on ebay. The hardcover edition won me over!

 

Listen to David Marr here

 

'There's cold in them thar hills', and this year is probably the coldest winter I've ever experienced in the hills around Nelligen. Even the people in the Bay are walking about all wrapped up in winter clothing, which isn't too good for the many outdoor coffee shops that've sprung up over the years. Whatever happened to all those BUSHELLS TEA-drinking Australians? And why does that small minority of coffee drinkers who used to be content with INTERNATIONAL ROAST suddenly demand this endless variety of coffees? Remember dinosaurs? Extinct! Remember video shops? Extinct! Remember internet cafés? Extinct! Coffee shops???

 

www.smartburn.com.au

 

What won't go extinct if this weather continues for much longer are shops like BARBEQUES GALORE where I spent over a hundred dollars this morning on two "SmartBurn" devices and two firebricks to place them on. Is it my imagination or is the fire really burning so much better as I sit right beside it to get started on "Burma Sahib" which arrived today?

Please pass me the "Glühwein", perfect wife.

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The happy man

Read along here

 

It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have often wondered at the self-confidence of politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of view. I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows oneself? Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself."

"The Happy Man" is a short story about giving advice. The narrator starts off with his general thoughts on giving advice, and then tells us about the time when a complete stranger walked into his house and asked for advice. W. Somerset Maugham never imposes his views on the reader. He puts a question and then leaves it to the reader to answer it.

I agree with Maugham that "life, unfortunately, is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable, and who am I that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own a complete and rounded thing."

"The Happy Man" has a happy ending as seems to have had my own life - although I haven't yet come to the final reckoning - as I sit close by the fireplace, beanie on my head and rug over my knees, and contemplate my own roller-coaster life full of downs as much as exhilarating ups.

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