Wudder Wun being, yes, Another One (as in, in this case, disaster) as our eldest son Christopher, now 44, used to say when he was very small and beginning to understand patterns.
Wudder Wun Disaster.
Just when, as per last post, I thought nothing else could go wrong, some kind soul in Graz nicked my £1000 Sony camera off my bike handlebars yesterday, in the broadest daylight either while I was inside a posting station packing 12 kg of panniers and camping gear to send back to the UK, or a bit later shopping at Lidl.
The young police officer as I reported the theft was very kind, filling out all the endless forms (this is Austria, after all) which I might need to claim on insurance.
He made me feel a lot better about my post-Hungary language capacities by wondering how I had come by a British passport when German was clearly my native tongue. Nice to be back in German-speaking territory and seriously to know how to communicate.
Except of course, re insurance, even the otherwise excellent Pedal Cover, with whom our bikes, travel and house are covered, say in the fine print that they won’t pay for mislaid or stolen items that are left unattended.
As the Sony RX-100 (bought two years ago in Hanover when an earlier Google Pixel had also spectacularly failed) had most assuredly been when it was taken, hanging in its expensive leather case from my handlebars ready for me to grab quickly for that passing shot.
The grab-quickly idea clearly worked, but not quite as intended. Not a position I’ll choose for a camera again.
Several of my readers and friends here and on Facebook have been very kind.
Lynn (Somerfield) complemented me on my “brilliant travel writing”, up there with Bill Bryson. Blimey!!! – Made my day, bigly, as The Donald would say.
Cousin Joanna notes my “litany of woes”, and hopes I won’t have further problems (ho ho…).
Joanna is passionately and touchingly Christian, about which we have wonderful conversations. She hasn’t given up hope on me yet, and I wonder whether following this blog she has also thought, as I have, of Job in the Old Testament, who had a bit of a rough time with Disasters of his Particular Day before coming right in the end.
And the wondrous Nik Heathman at Thorn Cycles, who built both my current solo and our tandem and who’s been consistently brilliant in keeping us on the road these past three years of spring touring around Europe:
You seem to be one of those rare people who can take anything in their stride and still seem to remain positive without having a breakdown [I think he means emotional, as the mechanical is a given…]. Everything will be better when the sun comes out!!
Very sweet and kind, Nik, though as to the sun, things would be better if it wouldn’t just mind going back in for a bit.
I’m writing this as I take a four-hour midday break from the 36-degree furnace outside, re-charging my Pendix batteries (that’s the artillery shells on the far table in the picture below) after their beating this morning coming up and over the Radl Pass from Austria into Slovenia with its stretches at up to 16% gradient.
Battery 1 was flat in under 30km, and I’m hoping to make it the thankfully rather flatter in a different sense 60km or so into Klagenfurt by sundown, for which I might need two fairly full charges …
And just for fun, to illustrate how windy the road up to the pass was, with its very respectful but very fast and large Slovenian earth-moving trucks charging up and down between Austria and Slovenia…
As to putting disasters in context, I forgot earlier to mention that one of my main molars has also disintegrated on this trip, fragmented in two assaults, I kid you not, by the sudden cold of a couple of delicious ice creams.
Which all brings to mind what my old BBC colleague Misha Glenny also notes in his brilliant three-part BBC radio documentary just concluded on the Invention of Hungary what Hungarians say when things could have been worse.
Recalling their humiliating defeat by the Ottomans in 1626, and rather as the Brits say “Worse Things Happen At Sea,”, the Hungarian version is:
Több is veszett Mohácsnál. More was lost at Mohács.
Having an expensive camera stolen is bad, but I’ve survived worse. I will keep telling myself that it’s not the end of the world, and although only a kind of in-law Hungarian with my passion for the language, I too will remember Mohács.
It was probably a silly idea in the first place to buy such an expensive camera. Of course something was going to happen, and what’s wrong with a cheaper one?
Well, I did get a new camera yesterday to take the Sony’s place, a Rollei (used to be a good brand) for a miserable 100 Euros. And the device is, yes, miserable, a Really Bad Idea. I’ve long had a much bigger SLR Sony A7 at home, which I love and have taken on many a bike trip in the past. Perhaps I should just stick, as it were, to the knitting.
Couple of other amusing observations (one might as well smile. The alternative is to get really miserable.)
Sending my two front panniers back to Brexit UK (everyone in Europe by the way, literally everyone I talk to about it, just rolls their eyes with compassion for such a stupid decision) was, of course, a palaver.
There were Customs Forms and Declarations and Rules. Channelling Kafka, who was after all a resident of then Austro-Hungary, the Post Office in Graz said they could send it only if despatched by someone with residency in Austria and present in person to sign the paperwork.
Given that I’m not after all intending to camp, I’d already packed and taped everything up I no longer need, including tent, sleeping bag, inflatable mattress and the kitchen sink, into an huge plastic bag helpfully provided by a nearby mattress shop.
Eventually, after much stuckness, soul-searching and despair, the two Postamt gents suggested I take my superfluous gear to Mailboxes Etc, a commercial outfit just up the road who I know also operate in the UK.
Off came the tape, out came the panniers back onto the front carrier, and off we all pedalled to discover thankfully that, yes, Mailboxes Etc Etc Etc were perfectly happy themselves to be the local address that was needed, and are indeed used to having customers referred to them by the Postamt.
I was so pleased, I completely forgot about the camera, still in place at this point, I’ve checked the photos. Talk about paying the price. For the rest of this trip I think I’ll stick with taking pix on the horrible little Rollei and using my clunky new military-spec Caterpillar75.
A couple more short observations before I gird my cycling-shorts-padded loins and head out into the heat again.
One is how quaint it can be when Istvan or Hans Foreigner borrow English and turn it into something that works for them and not for us.
“Handy” is the standard German for a mobile phone. Handy as they indeed are, but how did that happen as a word-borrowing?
And in Hungary, guess the standard cheery word that friends use when saying goodbye?
“Hello”!
Sounds like a Beatles song.
Another observation from Hungary is how strong nostalgia is becoming for the certainties and ordinary-life safety of the old Communist days.
I asked Istvan, my driver to the border on my way to get the bike motor sorted in Austria, what he thought of Hungary’s current system, of the Ukraine war, of Orban.
Taxi drivers being of course as I recall from my own BBC travels the fount of all journalistic reported wisdom, Istvan offered a perspective I’ve been hearing a lot now from older folk (though he was 20 years younger than me) both in Hungary and in Romania.
It was better in the old days.
I do continue – like Misha Glenny in his documentary – to be quite taken aback, though given human nature and thinking Brexit again not entirely surprised, by how strong this nostalgia is, despite so much evidence, should one either care to look or remember having actually lived ,there what a dreadful system communism was
Even if the external controls and strictures were unwelcome, what many folk remember is how, in their own dealings with each other, people were indeed often nicer and more community-minded than they are today in the market economy.
Istvan’s other quite disturbing thought in relation to Ukraine:
What the world needs now is a world war.
My Hungarian is imperfect, but good enough to know that that is exactly what he was saying.
People needed to be reminded, he said, of priorities, of relationships, of communities, and the current system could not continue.
Perhaps this post shouldn’t either.
Carpe Diem, there are still 50 km to go to Klagenfurt, and heading for the temperature tip after three in the afternoon, the cooler afternoon and evening call, for what Jutta and I always appreciate as our “evening run”, when the air allows itself to be sliced through the bike seems to fly.
And now, some pix (none Sony RX, I’m afraid…)
