Breakfast at "Riverbend" has none of the Breakfast at Tiffany-feeling about it. It's all about what's in front of me: maybe a hard-boiled egg; maybe a long and boring day in retirement.
The above filming of a typical breakfast at "Riverbend" prompted me to find out more about Bernhard-Viktor Christoph-Carl von Bülow, the German comedian, humorist, cartoonist, film director, actor and writer who was almost exclusively known under his pen name Loriot.
Germany is known for many things: reliable cars, punctual trains, a national reluctance to cross the road if the lights are on red, but not comedy. And yet, Loriot, who combined the eloquence and linguistic dexterity of a Stephen Fry with a Peter Sellers-style sense of the absurd, is - was! he died in August 2011 - living proof that there is such a thing as German humour. Through him, Germans learned to laugh.
Loriot was particularly good at poking fun at the German devotion to formality and earnestness. One of his most famous animations featured Herr Müller Lüdenscheid and Herr Doktor Klöbner, two naked men sitting in a hotel bath.
The cartoon begins with the former saying, "I don't wish to appear rude, but I would really like to be alone." The latter answers: "Who on earth are you?" The two then introduce themselves, with full honorifics. Herr Müller Lüdenscheid then says: "Would you mind telling me what you are doing in my bath?" To which the other man replies: "I was down in the basement ping pong room and got my room number mixed up." And on it goes.
I must confess that there's also something of a Loriot in me because whenever I see a crooked-hanging picture on a wall, I feel like reaching out and straightening it, but I won't after I watched the following clip:
Just after I had finished today's hard-boiled egg, I had lots of laughs as I then watched this collection of all of Loriot's television appearances:
Well, all that has taken care of a good part of a long and boring day.
