The run of bad nights continues; waking some time around three or four (with some part of my brain being already awake, recognising that the rest of me is starting to wake and trying desperately to stop it, to no avail) and then just having to doze until the alarm goes a couple of hours later as everything else kicks in – work, horrific state of the world, general feelings of utter inadequacy in the face of the first two. And as ever Hans recognises that I’m not asleep – we do share some strange bond, whereby if one of us is disturbed at night the other is too, and not just because he resorts to prodding me and prowling to get attention – and expects some fuss; he does settle down quite quickly in the crook of my arm, but it means I can’t now move. And then the chihuahuas downstairs start whining…
There will be general relief when we hand the wretched dogs back to the son tomorrow, as this week has been a strain all round. The cats are deeply unenthusiastic about dogs in general, but seem to have a particular dislike of little skittery yappy dogs – and far worse is the extent to which having dogs in the kitchen cramps their style as they can’t go in and out of the catflap but have to be let out via the porch (at least they have me working at home today and available to minister to their demands, rather than being completely shut in). The dogs have been off their food for much of the week, pining for their master and/or nervous of the cars, or possibly just manipulating us for fancier food. I’m not a dog person at all, and A., insofar as she was in the past, prefers things like bull mastiffs.
The morning routine simply takes longer when you not only add in the need to feed and clean up after chihuahuas but also elaborate routines with doors to keep the feuding sides separate; the elaborate choreography whereby everything gets sorted out without either of us getting in the other’s way breaks down. Eventually A. heads off to work only slightly late, and I decide that I’m too tired to start work immediately so I’ll make parkin in the hope of being slightly more together by nine or so. It doesn’t work – and the problem with parkin is that it’s supposed to be kept for at least a few days before eating, so I don’t get to cheer myself up with cake.
The result is a bit of a nothing day; it’s not that I did nothing – in fact I worked through a lot of student emails, Reviews Editor business, writing a tenure review report and other stuff that would have needed to be done sooner or later – but I didn’t do what I had planned to do (draft questionnaire questions for project on Chat-GPT and historical skills assessment) and didn’t feel like I achieved anything at all substantial. I’m feeling very conscious that next week is Reading Week and that I have both loaded all my hopes of rest and recovery onto it and postponed a pile of tasks until then on the basis that without teaching and travelling into Exeter I’ll have lots of spare time…
Made supper (chicken tikka and a spinach dal) while A. had her online German lesson, unsuccessfully fighting the urge to start on beer at half five, successfully resisting temptation to kick dogs when they got underfoot while I was working at the stove. Then into our Friday evening routine: Taggeschau at seven (deeply depressing as ever, but it handles international affairs rather better than the BBC – not everything is presented in terms of how it will affect national politics, and there’s no obvious navel-gazing about its own choice of language) followed by at least an hour of Bayerisch drama. For years the latter has been Hubert und Staller, a pleasant and undemanding comedy Krimi set in the Bavarian countryside, but we’ve probably seen all the episodes at least twice, albeit not in the right order, even the far inferior Hubert ohne Staller in which they tried and failed to reboot after one half of the central double act decided he’d had enough.
Finally, however, we are offered something new: Himmel Herrgott Sakrament, in which a down-to-earth and somewhat free-thinking priest from the countryside is brought to Munich to take charge of a huge but largely unfrequented church just off the Viktualienmarkt, and more generally to save the Catholic Church by acknowledging its deficiencies and offending traditionalists by being down-to-earth and somewhat free-thinking (he rides a motorbike! he lets dogs into the church! he declares the need for the abolition of compulsory celibacy to the attractive divorced mother who’s developing a website for him!). On the basis of the first two episodes, shown back to back, it’s really rather good; the main problem is a lack of a decent villain, as the scheming cardinal turns out to be an old friend who is simply trying to save the Catholic Church by acknowledging its deficiencies and bringing a down-to-earth and somewhat free-thinking rural priest to the capital, and the traditionalist Stadträtin – who is of course the mother of the attractive divorced mother – is already being humanised.
One gets the sense that the people responsible are somewhat torn between serious issues-based drama and heart-warming religious comedy along the lines of Um Himmels Willen (the late-lamented #HeartwarmingNunDrama that regularly used social issues as a minor plot point to be resolved by the head nun artfully manipulating the devious Bürgermeister), and the example of twenty-odd highly popular series of Um Himmels Willen means that the heart-warming religious comedy instinct wins out every time. I mean, we had ten minutes tops of the attractive divorced mother’s angsty teen daughter causing concern, hanging out with a dodgy crowd, staying out all night to highlight mother’s failure to hold things together, and then it’s revealed that she’s hanging with a bunch of earnest environmental activitists whom the radical priest has already recruited to his cause. We are not getting heavy doses of suspense here.
But when we’re going to bed at half nine through general exhaustion (and to get away from the dogs), and that’s a late evening, a lack of suspense is an advantage. Half an hour of sudoku – my current reading, a rather good Scandinavian Krimi, has just offered two paragraphs’ worth of the point of view of someone locked in a pitch-black underground room with just a tiny slit for air and half a bottle of water, which is too much like one of my worst nightmares for me to feel up to reading any further at the moment – and then lights out, hoping once again to sleep past four…
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