The Pineapple
Published weekly in Cleebourg, France.
Publisher and Director of Publication: Frank Peters
Editor - Janita Le Grange, South Africa brida.eu/pineapple ISSN 3131-8541
In This Issue
In This Issue.
Life is a bit like a chessboard, filled with little pieces and strictly defined moves. When you learn how to play for the first time, it can feel like the rules are being made up as you go along. Sometimes we forget a rule, our queen gets taken, and we lose. Some days we end up stuck in checkmate because we made a wrong move—and we lose again. But other times, we play the pieces right, follow the rules, and win the game.
Those chess rules are written down black on white. But the rules we share with the people closest to us are entirely different. They aren’t written down in contracts, handbooks, or lists; we simply understand them, absorb them, and follow them. They live in quiet understandings, unspoken boundaries, and the occasional household explosion when a line is crossed.
In this issue, we take a closer look at these invisible agreements that govern our relationships with partners, children, friends, and colleagues. But what happens when we realize we aren’t always playing by the exact same rulebook?
In her editorial, The Rules Between Us, Janita explores the little rules that shape everyday life, from household expectations to the things we assume everybody else already knows. But what happens when two people have completely different ideas about what is normal?
From the rules we live with at home, we head out into the wider world, where familiar behaviour can suddenly look very different.
In The Trip I Still Think About Every Week, Alexander looks back on a family trip to California that left him with unforgettable memories. From friendly strangers and spectacular scenery to the shocking poverty he encountered in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, he discovers an America full of contrasts — a journey he still thinks about almost every week.
Monica’s Postcards, Koalas Around the World, take us to Melbourne, where a collection of wonderfully dressed koalas represents countries and famous characters from around the world. Can you recognise them from their costumes and accessories? There are fourteen to identify, so get ready to test your international knowledge!
After travelling across the world, we return to the smaller exchanges of everyday life, where money, generosity and effort do not always add up in quite the way we expect.
In The Bill Tells Only Half the Story, Ralf knows that an expensive meal can be worth every cent — or leave a bad taste. From a disappointing restaurant visit in Gran Canaria to an old friend helping repair his car, a €2.50 coffee-machine repair and three helpings of a delicious salad, he explores why the real value of something cannot always be measured in money.
In Two Hundred Kilos of Mussels and a Week of Possibilities, Sylvie has a busy week ahead in France, starting with 200 kilograms of mussels to prepare for a tennis club feast. Between her daughter’s flower-selling challenge, holiday plans that may or may not happen, safari stories and conversations about life in France and South Africa, she wonders whether her week off will leave any time to relax.
In Two Hundred Kilos of Mussels and a Week of Possibilities , Sylvie has a busy week ahead in France, starting with 200 kilograms of mussels to prepare for a tennis club feast.
Fabrice reflects on the difference between authority and respect in Respect Is Not a Rank, drawing on his experiences of work, responsibility and military life. Following the rules is one thing, but deciding who deserves respect is not always quite so straightforward.
Of course, even when everyone has the best intentions, agreeing on the right thing to do can become surprisingly complicated.
In Ladies First, Age Before Beauty, or Rock-Paper-Scissors?, what happens when everyone is trying to be polite, but nobody agrees who should go first? Join Rosii, Monica, Fruitloop and the Mayor for a wonderfully chaotic Lunch involving stubborn doorways, birthday privileges, an inflatable duck, a missing cat and a spaceship to Mars with one seat too few. Good manners have never been quite so complicated!
In Atlantic Corridor’s Good Manners Travel Well, what would happen if Ismar and Ritesh visited each other’s homes in Brazil and India? From airport collections and restaurant bills to shoes, food and unexpected house rules, the two discover that hospitality is sometimes less about knowing the customs than understanding the people.
And perhaps, underneath all these customs and expectations, there is something simpler about how we make room for each other.
In The Human Bit, the Mayor invites us to slow down, put aside the need to prove ourselves, and consider how we make room for one another. Two trees sharing the light offer a simple image of living alongside others without asking them to move out of the way.
In Was That Friendly, or Was I Just Insulted?, Manfred and Martin take us on a wonderfully entertaining tour of North Hesse, where stubborn locals, suspicious friendliness, apple wine and unexpected coffee etiquette are all part of the experience. From polite English drivers to German television habits and holes in socks, they discover that good manners may have less to do with where people come from than with the people themselves.
From the peculiarities of human behaviour, we move to a bigger question: what happens when understanding the world is no longer the same as knowing what to do about it?
In What Are We Going to Do About It?, Bruce and the Mayor explore the relationship between thinking and doing, from power and responsibility to trust, technology and artificial intelligence. As AI gives us more information and choices than ever before, they wonder whether the real challenge is finding answers — or deciding what matters, taking responsibility and doing something with what we learn.
After all that thinking, it is time for something considerably more practical — and rather delicious.
In Ralf’s Kitchen, Ralf’s Three-Helping Chickpea and Quinoa Salad, Ralf arrives at a barbecue expecting to enjoy the meat, but it is Petra’s chickpea and quinoa salad that steals the show. Three helpings later, he has a new favourite recipe to share, complete with feta, rocket and a delicious homemade dressing.
And finally, just when we think we have worked out how people ought to behave, Fruitloop University reminds us that things could always be much more complicated.
In Who Goes First at the Monster Café?, our latest Peeling Potatoes adventure, even deciding who should go first can become a complicated business. Join the familiar characters of Fruitloop University for another wonderfully ridiculous encounter with the rules of everyday life.
And in The Next Issue — Whose Rules Are These Anyway?, we turn our attention to the people who make the rules in the first place. From family traditions and workplace expectations to the customs we follow without questioning, who decided how things should be done — and do we really have to listen?
Curious? Grab a beverage, settle down and read or listen to Pineapple 34.
Editorial
The Rules Between Us.
Have you ever stopped to evaluate the delicate, unspoken rulebooks we maintain between spouses, parents, children, and friends? In almost every relationship, there is a constant, quiet calculus running in the background: Who do I share this with? Who isn’t supposed to hear about that?
Sometimes, keeping track of it all creates a kind of inner turmoil. It feels like a tornado building up inside—until, inevitably, you let something slip to the wrong person, and you get slung right out of the funnel into orbit. Well, maybe not literally, but emotionally? It certainly feels that way.
Of course, every household has its visible, everyday rules. Wipe your feet. Take off your shoes. Put your plate and cup in the sink. That’s all completely normal. But what about the rules between us that nobody ever articulates out loud—the ones we just know?
Don’t leave your shoes right in the doorway because it will drive someone absolutely crazy. Don’t leave the shampoo lid open unless you want your husband to come rocketing out of the shower like a missile. (Though, to his credit, my husband knows me by now and has mostly made peace with my flaws. It’s fine. We survive!)
Still, it begs the question: What happens when I have rules, but nobody follows them? And what happens when they have rules, and I’m the one ignoring them?
I suppose it depends entirely on the situation. Take a classic household sequence: I ask you to clean up after yourself. Rule #1: Don’t leave a mess. You leave it anyway. I ask again. You ignore it again. I explode. Everyone looks around in shock, wondering why Mum is so upset! It’s the eternal circle of life: Make a mess ==> leave it ==> get asked to pack it away ==> ignore request ==> get shouted at ==> finally pack it away with a shattered ego while I stand there fuming. And somehow, despite all of that, we still have to make it to 10:00 AM without glaring each other to death over breakfast.
Over the past few weeks, as we’ve been exploring these unwritten rules of life—what’s polite, what’s strange, what’s familiar, and what’s unexpected—one thing has become abundantly clear: there is a vast gulf between our expectations and the expectations of others. There is my rulebook, their rulebook, school rules, work rules, and the rules of the universe.
And if there is one universal truth behind all of them? We all bend the rules to our own advantage whenever we can.
Grab your coffee (and remember to close the shampoo lid!), sit back, and welcome to Pineapple 34, where we dive headfirst into the rules of life.
Feature
The Trip I Still Think About Every Week.
California gave me beautiful scenery, relaxed people and memories I still carry. It also showed me things I found much harder to understand.
By Alexander, Germany.
When I think about my trip to America two years ago, I still think about it almost every week.
It was my first time in the United States. We travelled as a family group, with my brother, my sister-in-law, Julia and the children. There were the things you expect from California: huge cities, big cars, long beaches, enormous roads and landscapes that feel completely different from home.
But some of the memories that stayed with me are much smaller.
One of them is a man in Oakhurst.
A Man in Oakhurst.
Oakhurst is close to Yosemite National Park. After Los Angeles, with all the traffic, people and noise, it felt almost like returning to normal life. It was a small place, surrounded by trees, with Yosemite in the background.
The weather was not especially good. It was autumn, the trees were changing colour, and everything felt quieter.
At our hotel there was an older man, perhaps around sixty. I remember him because speaking with him was surprisingly difficult.
He spoke very quickly, with a strong dialect. I asked him for the best route to a restaurant because I had to collect some food, and I could hardly understand his answer.
I actually found that quite funny.
I come from Bavaria, and I know exactly what it is like when somebody speaks a strong regional version of a language. When I speak with people from other parts of Germany, they probably sometimes have the same problem with me.
Normally, when I speak English, I try to speak clearly. This man did not do that. He simply spoke his English.
And I liked him.
He was friendly, the situation was relaxed, and somehow that small conversation became part of my memory of the place. When I think about Oakhurst now, I remember the scenery, the trees, Yosemite in the distance — and this man whose English I could hardly understand.
There was another small moment there that meant something to me. Before driving into the national park, we needed snow chains. We went into a shop, and I saw a large shelf full of CRC products.
There was another small moment there that meant something to me. Before driving into the national park, we needed snow chains. We went into a shop, and I saw a large shelf full of CRC products.
At the time, I had already signed my contract with CRC but had not yet started working there.
Seeing those products on a shelf in America felt good. It was one of those small moments that probably means very little to anybody else but stays with you.
The Easy Side of California.
My impression of many of the people we met in California was that they were relaxed and easygoing.
Maybe some of that came from being tourists. When somebody realised we were Germans, it created an easy situation. We were interested in them, they were interested in us, and there was something unusual enough about the meeting to start a conversation.
We also met several police officers because my brother and sister-in-law visited a police station to exchange patches. The officers we met were very relaxed and friendly.
That fitted the California I had imagined before the trip: sun, sea, beaches, surfers, the Beach Boys and a certain easy mentality.
Of course, I only saw the country as a tourist for a little over two weeks. I cannot say that what I saw represents the whole United States.
But the feeling stayed with me.
When somebody asked me whether the grass was greener on the other side, I had to say yes — at least when I look back at that trip.
The scenery, the people, the cars, the streets: almost everything was new to me. That made the journey special.
At the same time, there was another America that I had not expected.
The Part I Could Not Understand.
One of the biggest differences I noticed was poverty.
We also have homeless people in Bavaria, of course. But what I saw in parts of the United States felt different in scale and in how visible it was.
In Los Angeles, we walked past people lying on the pavement. Some appeared to be completely unconscious. At first, I honestly wondered whether some of them were dead.
After a while, something strange happened.
I became used to seeing it.
That may be one of the memories that troubles me most. Something that shocked me on the first day could begin to feel normal after only a week.
I remember our first night particularly clearly. We had arrived late, around ten in the evening, and because of the jet lag my brother and I were awake again at three or four in the morning.
We decided to walk to a supermarket to buy something for breakfast.
There were tents on the street. It was a very windy night, and we could hear people inside them.
For me, coming from Bavaria, where my own life feels secure and ordinary, that was very difficult to understand.
Las Vegas gave me another version of the same contrast. I had seen a documentary about people living in tunnels beneath the city, and I found the idea frightening. Later, near the famous Las Vegas sign, I saw an entrance that made me wonder whether it connected to those tunnels.
Further into the city, I looked down through an opening and saw people below street level.
Above them was Las Vegas.
Lights, hotels, money, casinos, entertainment.
Below them, people were living under the streets.
That contrast was hard to forget.
And Then I Lost €200.
Las Vegas also produced a less serious memory.
My brother and I drove there while the women and children flew. Their flight was delayed, which left the two of us alone in Las Vegas for five or six hours.
We made a simple decision.
“Let’s rock and roll.”
We went into a casino.
One hour later, the rock and roll was finished.
I had lost €200.
I am normally very careful with money, so this does not sound much like me. But Las Vegas was a special moment. I knew exactly what I was doing, Julia knew about it afterwards, and I can still laugh about it.
Perhaps that is why the whole journey stays so strongly in my mind.
It was not one America.
There was the quiet man in Oakhurst whose English I could barely understand. There were relaxed police officers and enormous beaches. There were shelves full of products from the company I was about to join. There were huge cars, huge cities and landscapes I had never seen before.
There were also tents in the wind, people lying on pavements and another life happening beneath the streets of Las Vegas.
I came home with almost entirely good memories of the trip.
But good memories do not mean that everything I saw was easy to understand.
Maybe that is why I still think about it every week.
Postcards
Koalas Around the World
This week’s Postcards come to us from Monica in Adelaide, who spotted this wonderfully international collection of koalas at Be Marsupial while visiting Melbourne. The St Kilda shop specialises in playful Australian gifts and souvenirs, with many of its designs illustrated in-house and given a distinctly local sense of humour. These koalas travel rather further afield, borrowing food, clothes, characters and traditions from countries around the world — which seemed too good an opportunity for a quiz to miss. Be Marsupial is at 74 Acland Street, St Kilda, Victoria 3182, Australia.
Have a look at each koala, follow the clues, and see how many places — or people — you can recognise before revealing the answer.
I’m dressed for tradition, carrying something fermented, and my hat is rather more elaborate than yours. Where am I?
I have a pretzel in one paw, a very large beer in the other, and absolutely no intention of counting calories.
My background is tiled, my snack is filled, and my drink is icy. I belong to Italy — but which island am I visiting?
I’m dressed for tradition, carrying sushi in one hand and a tiny tree in the other. Where am I?
My address is 221B Baker Street, London. I have a deerstalker, a pipe and a magnifying glass. Who am I?
I’m wearing tartan, carrying three pipes and making enough noise to wake a glen. Where am I?
I’ve brought chocolate, a cuckoo clock and a very practical hat. Which country am I visiting?
I work at the Tower of London, wear a rather magnificent red uniform, and tourists know me by a nickname involving beef. Who am I?
I’ve brought a bowler hat, a monocle, an umbrella and, naturally, a cup of tea. Which country am I visiting?
I’m on a Vespa, wearing the colours of the flag, and somehow I’ve still found a hand for gelato. Where am I?
I’m dressed for carnival, wearing enough feathers to frighten a peacock, and carrying a lime-filled drink. Which country am I visiting?
I was born on Corsica, crowned myself Emperor of the French, and left my mark on Europe from battlefields to law books. Who am I?
I’ve brought a baguette, some cheese and a beret. Which country am I visiting?
I gave the world the Rubik’s Cube, I take my salami seriously, and Monica has a family connection here. Which country am I visiting?
Answers Korea, Germany, Sicily, Japan, Sherlock Holmes, Scotland, Switzerland, A Yeoman Warder (Beefeater), England, Italy, Brazil, Napoléon Bonaparte, France, Hungary.
Visual pauseThe Pineapple
Member Stories
The Bill Only Tells Half the Story.
Some meals are expensive and worth every cent. Others are expensive and leave a bad taste. Between a Portuguese restaurant, an old friend, a broken coffee machine and three helpings of salad, I have discovered that the price is only part of what matters.
By Ralf The Grillmeister, Germany.
Land, Sea and a Little Bit of Garlic.
Last Friday, Ira and I went to our favourite Portuguese restaurant. We have been there many times, and I already know what I want before I sit down. That is always a good sign.
We started with a special bruschetta. Not the normal one with only tomatoes, but a mixture of tomatoes, peppers, a little cheese and something sweet and sour. You get three small pieces of bread and plenty of the vegetable mixture. It is very, very good.
After that came Land und Meer, land and sea. And I can tell you, there is a lot of land and a lot of sea on this plate. Beef fillet, pork fillet, spicy chorizo, little calamari tubes and scampi. Everything is grilled, and they have this fantastic oil with garlic chopped so small that you can hardly see the pieces.
My wife likes the fish and seafood, so she gives me her beef and pork. For me, this is a very good arrangement.
There are also wonderful little potatoes, cut thin and fried until they are really crispy, and black beans with something like pancetta. You look at the plate and you don’t know where to start. What should I eat first? The meat? The calamari? The potatoes?
For me, the beef comes first. It must be hot and medium rare. I don’t like it when it is well done. That is very important.
We know the people in this restaurant. Ira had telephoned before we went, and Adriana, the waitress, knew we were coming. There is always something familiar about being there. We enjoy the food, we enjoy the evening, and we know what to expect.
And who paid?
I did. But Ira and I have only one bank account, so perhaps it is more correct to say that my card did the work.
That is the easy part of the story. The more interesting question is what makes a restaurant bill worthwhile.
The Restaurant Where I Don’t Need a Menu.
There is another restaurant in Otterndorf that I like very much. It is run by a Spanish man and his German wife, and the food is a mixture of Spanish and Italian cooking.
Sometimes the waiter doesn’t even want me to look at the menu. He has something special for me, and he knows I will probably enjoy it.
I like looking at what other people are eating. When I see an interesting plate going past, I ask what it is. The waiter tells me, and I say that perhaps next time I will have that. But when I return, there is another special dish waiting to be discovered.
One of my favourites has scampi, large calamari tubes and many, many, many pieces of garlic. There is a fantastic sauce, little salted Spanish potatoes with mojo sauce, and a salad with a dressing that is really something special.
Then I look around again. There are things written on the walls, dishes that are not on the normal menu. Perhaps something with truffles or porcini mushrooms. I begin thinking about what I might order next time, and the waiter laughs because he knows me already.
An evening for Ira and me, with a starter, can cost between 100 and 120 euros. That is a lot of money for dinner. I know that.
But when the food is excellent and the evening is so enjoyable, I don’t have a problem paying it.
I am not sitting there thinking only about the price of the ingredients. Somebody has prepared this meal, somebody has thought about the flavours, and somebody has made us feel welcome. The waiter talks with us, remembers what I enjoy, and sometimes recommends something I would not have chosen myself.
I leave the restaurant happy. That makes a difference.
But I have also experienced the opposite.
The Most Expensive Sunset in Gran Canaria.
It was my birthday, the sixth of January, and we were on holiday in Gran Canaria.
We have friends who live there, and Kirsten suggested a special Italian restaurant. She speaks Spanish and knows the island, so we went together.
It was a fantastic evening.
The waiter welcomed us, and somebody came out of the kitchen with a beautiful fish. They showed us what they could prepare, how they would grill it, and what would come with it. Everything sounded wonderful.
I paid for the three of us, and although the bill was quite high, I had absolutely no problem with it. The food was fantastic, the people were friendly, and we had a lovely evening.
I paid for the three of us, and although the bill was quite high, I had absolutely no problem with it.
Two days later, I said to Ira that we should go back. It had been so good, and I wanted to enjoy it again.
This time, Kirsten was not with us.
And suddenly it was a completely different restaurant.
Nobody seemed particularly interested in us. We were just another two tourists sitting at a table. I asked about the fish we had enjoyed on our first visit, but the waiter told me that the large fish was only for two people. Ira wanted calamari, not fish, so that was not possible.
In the end, I ate a pizza.
Now, the location was still beautiful. We sat outside looking across the promenade towards the sea. The sun was going down, and then a sailing boat appeared exactly in front of it. The sunlight was shining on the water.
It was so kitschy! You could hardly imagine a more perfect holiday picture.
And yet, something was missing.
The food was okay, but the bill was very expensive again. On our first visit, I had been happy to pay. On the second, I was not happy at all.
We had gone back expecting another wonderful evening, and instead we felt like two people out of a hundred. Nothing special. Just customers.
I told Kirsten what had happened. She recommends restaurants to visitors as part of her work, so I wanted her to know that our experience without her had been completely different.
Of course, I cannot say what happened in the kitchen or why the service changed. I only know how the two evenings felt to us.
The first was worth the money.
The second had a beautiful sunset, but that was not enough.
My Oldest Friend and a Rusty Car.
When I go out with friends, we normally pay separately. That is easy, and nobody has to make a big discussion about the bill.
But sometimes friendship makes the question of payment much more complicated.
Take my friend Andreas.
Andreas is my oldest friend. Not necessarily my best friend, but the oldest. We have known each other for so many years that we can spend an afternoon talking about our wives, our childhood, and all the things we experienced when we were young.
Some time ago, we had a problem with rust underneath Ira’s old Volkswagen Eos. Andreas knew how we could treat it and invited me to come over so that we could work on the car together.
We used special materials, oil and wax, and spent time working underneath the car. These materials were not cheap, and Andreas was helping me with something that would otherwise have cost money.
So I asked him what I could do for him. Did he need anything? Could I give him something?
He said no.
For him, it was already wonderful that we were spending time together, working on the car and talking about old stories.
I understood what he meant, but I still had a little problem.
I don’t like it when somebody does something for me and I cannot give anything back.
Then I had an idea.
Andreas and his wife Tina also like good restaurants. Why don’t the four of us go out for a lovely meal? I would invite them, and we could enjoy another evening together.
He thought it was a very good idea. Finding a date would be difficult, so perhaps November or December would work. That was no problem for me.
And that was our arrangement.
Now, if I tried to calculate the value of everything, it would become ridiculous. How much was the rust protection? How much was Andreas’s time? What should I pay for the work? And what is an afternoon talking about childhood worth?
Andreas was not asking me for money. He had enjoyed helping me, and we had enjoyed our time together.
I wanted to thank him with something we could all enjoy.
A dinner seemed much better than trying to put a price on our friendship.
Two Euros and Fifty Cents.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I spend money without thinking.
I am an electrician, and I like understanding how things work. If a machine breaks, my first idea is not to buy another one. My first idea is to find out what is wrong.
Recently, our coffee machine developed a problem.
When I switched it on, I heard a little strange noise coming from the switch. So I opened it and looked inside. The electrical contacts were damaged. They had burned, and the switch was no longer working correctly.
I found a replacement and repaired the machine.
The new switch cost two euros and fifty cents.
Two euros and fifty cents!
Ira was delighted. She reminded me that I had also repaired a washing machine for her parents. They had been thinking about buying a new one, but I had taken the machine apart, removed the motor and discovered that the carbon brushes were worn out. I ordered replacements, fitted them, put everything back together, and the washing machine worked again.
For me, that is normal. I understand electricity, and I enjoy repairing things.
For Ira, it was another reason to be happy with her husband.
We even talked about the possibility of celebrating the money saved with a good dinner. I thought that was a very nice idea.
You see, I am perfectly happy to pay for good food and an enjoyable evening. But why should I buy a new coffee machine when a switch for €2.50 can solve the problem?
There are different ways to get good value from money.
Three Helpings of Salad.
Last weekend, we had a barbecue with friends in Bremerhaven.
Our group even has a WhatsApp name: Grillen mit Freunden. Barbecuing with friends. That tells you quite a lot about us already.
Normally, when I talk about a barbecue, I talk about meat. I love preparing a beautiful beef fillet, cutting away the silver skin with my special flexible knife, preparing the seasoning, and working at the grill. For me, preparing meat is almost like a little holiday. I become relaxed.
But this time, one of the most interesting things on the table was not meat at all.
Our friend Petra had made a quinoa salad with chickpeas, cucumber, tomatoes, peppers, rocket and feta cheese. She had a special dressing with mustard, olive oil, honey, garlic, gherkins and dill. Everything was mixed together into a wonderful vinaigrette.
It was fantastic.
I took one helping. Then another.
Everybody was enjoying the food, and our friends had also prepared some very good meat on the barbecue. I ate that too, of course.
But I kept coming back to the salad.
At the end, Petra asked whether everybody had finished eating.
Everybody said yes.
Except me.
I said, “No, wait a moment. I must take another spoonful.”
That was my third helping.
Now, you could ask whether it is polite to take three helpings of somebody’s salad. Perhaps somebody might think I was being greedy.
But I didn’t see it that way. The salad was so good that I simply wanted more.
And Petra was happy.
She had been a little unsure whether the recipe would suit our tastes. It was something different from what we normally eat together, and she wanted to know whether we liked it.
Well, I think three helpings gave her a very clear answer.
I liked it so much that I got the recipe and made the salad myself at home. I also wanted to prepare it again for our next little trip in the motorhome, when we would be spending time with friends beside the River Elbe.
That is another lovely thing about cooking together. Somebody brings a new recipe, everybody tries it, and suddenly you have something new to make in your own kitchen.
There was no restaurant bill involved. No waiter, no expensive fish, no discussion about who should pay.
Just a table with friends, good food, and somebody who was pleased that her cooking had made other people happy.
When I think about all these experiences, I cannot say that money is unimportant. Of course it is important. A good meal costs money, good ingredients cost money, and I know the difference between two euros and fifty cents and a restaurant bill of 120 euros.
But the price alone doesn’t tell me whether something was worthwhile.
I can remember an expensive evening in Gran Canaria when the sunset was perfect and I still left disappointed. I can remember an afternoon with Andreas when he wanted nothing more than the pleasure of spending time together. And I can remember a wonderful salad that made me go back to the table three times.
I don’t know exactly how much the ingredients for Petra’s salad cost.
I only know that I wanted another spoonful.
And for the person who made it, perhaps that was the nicest payment of all.
Member Stories
Two Hundred Kilos of Mussels and a Week of Possibilities.
Between a busy family weekend, a daughter’s flower-selling challenge, changing seasons and a possible spa day, Sylvie has plenty happening in her corner of France.
By Sylvie, France.
Sometimes, when you have a week of holiday coming, you imagine that you will have time to relax, go somewhere nice and perhaps do something different. But when I look at everything we have planned, I am not sure how much relaxing we will actually do.
The weather is already changing here in France. We have about 12 degrees, some rain, and the mornings are getting darker. My husband is preparing the swimming pool for winter, and we have plenty of things to do in the garden before the cold weather arrives.
My youngest daughter is coming home, although not for very long. She has an appointment to cut and colour her hair, then she will return by train before coming home again for the holidays. She has her own plans now, including a trip to Paris with a friend.
And this Sunday, we have something rather different planned.
More than 200 people are coming to eat mussels and French fries.
Two Hundred Kilos of Mussels.
Every year, we help with a big meal organised through the tennis club. It is a very popular event, and people come to enjoy mussels and fries, with as much as they want to eat.
We expect more than 200 people, and we calculate approximately one kilogram of mussels per person. That means at least 200 kilograms of mussels to prepare.
You can imagine the quantity!
On Saturday, there is already plenty to do because all those mussels need to be washed and checked. Then, on Sunday, everything must be ready for the guests.
The mussels are cooked in very large pots with white wine, onions and cream. You cannot prepare that quantity in an ordinary kitchen pot. You need several enormous ones.
A professional chef now takes care of the cooking, with people helping him organise the ingredients and preparations. About five years ago, we cooked everything ourselves, and that was also successful. But having a chef makes things more practical because we can concentrate on serving everybody.
And serving more than 200 hungry people is not a small job.
My husband and I help with the preparations, the service and the cleaning afterwards. We have to carry food, collect dishes, remove empty bottles and make sure people have their drinks.
Sometimes you arrive at a large table and everybody starts telling you what they want. One person asks for this, another wants that, and then somebody else adds something.
At some point, I have to say, “Stop, stop, stop, stop. Can you repeat, please? I don’t remember.”
You cannot remember everything when so many people are speaking at once!
The guests eat first. We only have our own meal when everybody has finished, and even then, we have to eat in smaller groups because somebody must continue serving drinks and looking after the tables.
It is a lot of work, but it is also nice. You see people you have not met for a long time, and between carrying trays and returning to the kitchen, you can stop and have a little conversation.
Last year, the dessert included homemade ice cream prepared by the chef. I do not know what he is planning this year, but people always give very good feedback about the food.
I do not know what he is planning this year, but people always give very good feedback about the food.
For 20 euros, with unlimited mussels and fries, I think it is a very fair price.
Of course, there is one person in the family who has found a much easier way to enjoy the day.
My daughter has decided that she will come only to eat.
She will sit, enjoy herself and have a good time while we do all the serving.
And I have to pay for her ticket as well!
The Daughter Who Has Flowers to Sell.
My youngest daughter has another challenge at the moment. Through her studies, she has to sell little boxes containing soil and flower seeds.
The boxes cost five euros each and have been prepared by people with disabilities. The idea is also to encourage flowers that attract bees and help pollination, so there is a positive environmental purpose.
But the students are not simply given the boxes to admire. They must sell them.
The minimum is 30 boxes, and my daughter told me that selling 50 could give her extra points towards an exam.
So she came home with her boxes and immediately started asking us how many we wanted to buy.
My husband wanted to know why we needed them and what we were going to do with all these flowers.
I understand his question. We already have a garden, and now winter is coming. But the flowers can be started indoors and planted outside when spring arrives.
My sister-in-law bought two boxes, her grandmother bought two, her sister bought one, and we bought two.
I am already imagining what will happen if she cannot sell all 30.
I am sure that, at the end, I will have to buy the difference!
But this is supposed to be a learning exercise. She needs to approach people, explain the product and convince them to buy it. That is not always easy, especially when you have to sell 30 or even 50 boxes.
I suggested that she should take advantage of the tennis meal on Sunday. There will be more than 200 people there, so she has plenty of possible customers.
She could even ask Frank, who has a large garden. Perhaps he needs several boxes, not only one.
We were laughing about how many flowers he might be able to grow in his vegetable patch.
The boxes can also be used in pots, which makes them quite practical. I think that by spring I may have several pots filled with flowers.
Whether I planned to have them or not is another question.
My daughter has also started going to a fitness club. She has been going for about three weeks, and at the moment she is keeping it up.
How long will it last? I don’t know.
Perhaps she will surprise me.
A Holiday That Might Not Be a Holiday.
Next week, I have some days off, but we are not planning to travel away for a proper holiday.
My husband has to organise his holidays a year in advance, which I find incredible. How can you know exactly what you want to do so far ahead? Things change, and the children make their own plans.
My youngest daughter is a student now. She has her own activities, her friends and her trip to Paris. We have our holiday at home.
I also prefer not to travel during the school holidays because everything is more expensive. So we will use the time to do things around the house.
There are windows to clean, the vegetable garden to prepare for winter and wood to cut in the garden. Depending on the weather, we may do some of the cutting on Saturday with family members.
But I would also like to have at least one day when we do something enjoyable.
My husband and I are thinking about visiting a spa in Germany. It is a very large one, about an hour’s drive from home, and we have never been there before. We have heard good things about it.
Perhaps we will go on Wednesday.
Another possibility is a trip to Strasbourg with our daughter. There is a Titanic experience using virtual reality, where visitors wear special equipment to explore the story of the famous ship.
That could be interesting because it is something different.
And, of course, we would probably go to a restaurant afterwards.
When Janita asked whether the family would be more interested in the Titanic or the restaurant, I said both.
I think the restaurant might help everybody agree to the outing!
But nothing is decided yet. It depends on the time, the weather and what everybody wants to do.
Perhaps the spa. Perhaps the Titanic. Perhaps we stay home and clean the windows.
We will see.
A Thousand Safari Photographs.
Last week, a friend visited me after returning from a safari holiday in Tanzania with her family.
She has been home for about three weeks, but she still has stars in her eyes when she speaks about the experience.
She took more than a thousand photographs.
She started showing them to me, and after a while I told her to stop.
Not because I was not interested, but because perhaps one day I will go there myself, and I want to have some surprises left!
She showed me the landscapes, the animals and the beautiful lodges where they stayed. Some of the accommodation was really luxurious.
But she told me something interesting about the photographs. When you look at the pictures, you see bushes and landscapes that do not always appear so special. In some ways, they could look like countryside near home.
In reality, she said, the experience was completely different.
She saw giraffes, antelopes, monkeys and other animals. They had the same guide throughout their safari, and she was very happy with him because he drove carefully and adapted the experience to the group.
Other vehicles sometimes travelled much faster over the rough roads, but their guide took his time.
That makes a difference when you want to enjoy what you are seeing.
She also described a village visit that felt too organised for tourists. She had hoped for something more authentic, although she said the food was very good.
At the end of the safari, the family travelled to Zanzibar, where they spent four days relaxing.
The sea was apparently so warm, more than 30 degrees according to my friend, that they preferred swimming in the pool to cool down.
She also showed me photographs of the beautiful white sand on the beaches.
That part sounded very nice.
But to reach Zanzibar, they travelled in a small aeroplane with propellers.
When she described it, I was not so enthusiastic.
I am not sure I would like to fly in such a small plane!
The holiday sounded wonderful, but it was also expensive. September seemed to be a good time to travel because there were fewer families on holiday and the prices were perhaps a little lower.
It has certainly given me something to think about for a future trip.
France and South Africa, Not So Different.
During our conversation, Janita and I also spoke about what has been happening in France.
I have been very sad to see the demonstrations and the damage shown on television. There are genuine problems that people want the government to address, including the cost of living and difficulties in education.
I understand that people have concerns and want things to improve.
But I do not understand why some people use demonstrations as an opportunity to burn buildings, break doors and destroy things.
Seeing damage to old buildings is particularly upsetting.
My youngest daughter is planning to travel to Paris with a friend next week. They booked their tickets and accommodation before the recent trouble, and now I am not very happy about the timing.
I think they have chosen accommodation in a good area, but naturally I would prefer to know that everything will be calm.
They have already paid for their tickets, and she still wants to go.
We hope the situation will be better by then.
I also saw reports about hotels receiving cancellations because tourists are worried about visiting France. That affects much more than the hotels. Restaurants, shops and other businesses depend on visitors.
And when buildings are damaged, somebody eventually has to pay for the repairs.
Janita told me about similar unrest that South Africa experienced some years ago, when people broke into shopping centres and warehouses and stole goods.
She remembered seeing a video of somebody pushing a stolen refrigerator along the road. Other people apparently took food, clothing, shoes and household goods, with some of the items later appearing for sale online.
We were both surprised by some of the stories.
I had seen something on French television about somebody trying to sell a single shoe.
Janita immediately wondered what had happened to the other one.
It was a strange detail in a serious conversation, but it made us stop and think about how absurd some situations can become.
We also compared petrol prices.
I explained that we sometimes drive across the border into Germany to fill the car because petrol can be cheaper there. A few weeks earlier, German drivers had been coming into France for the same reason.
It changes depending on the prices.
Janita laughed because, in South Africa, she cannot simply drive across a nearby border whenever petrol is cheaper somewhere else.
That is one advantage of living close to another country.
We spoke about political promises too. In France, there is discussion about retirement ages and how governments will pay for everything they promise.
I keep coming back to the same practical question: where will the money come from?
Janita recognised the problem. She said that political parties in South Africa also make many promises, especially around election time.
Our countries are very different, but some of the concerns are familiar.
One Country Gets Darker, the Other Gets Hotter.
The weather is another difference between our two countries.
Here in France, autumn has arrived. The mornings are dark, the temperature is dropping, and soon we will change our clocks for winter.
I do not like this period very much.
When the clocks change, it will become dark earlier in the evening, and the days will feel shorter.
Janita told me that South Africa does not change its clocks. Their time stays the same throughout the year.
At the moment, she is enjoying, or perhaps enduring, temperatures of around 29 to 32 degrees.
I could hardly believe it.
Here I am preparing the swimming pool for winter, while she is wearing a T-shirt and trying to stay out of the sun.
She said that earlier in the week it had been only 12 degrees in her area, and now it was more than 30.
That is a big difference in just a few days.
I told her she must need so many different clothes, and then she has more washing to do because she wears different things every day.
Meanwhile, parts of southern France have been experiencing serious flooding. I had seen reports of houses with water reaching very high levels.
It worries me because the south has also experienced very dry periods, and then suddenly there is too much rain.
I enjoy visiting southern France in spring or summer, but I would not want to move there permanently. I feel that the weather problems are becoming more difficult.
We spoke about climate change and what these conditions might mean for the next generation.
It is not a pleasant thought.
And yet, even while discussing weather problems, we were comparing the simple things: when the sun rises, when it becomes dark and whether there are clouds in the sky.
I asked Janita whether she had blue skies.
She said there was not a cloud in sight and promised to send me a photograph.
I think I will appreciate that picture when I look outside at our grey autumn weather.
Perhaps a Little Time to Relax.
So, there is quite a lot happening.
My daughter has her flowers to sell, her fitness club and her plans for Paris. We have a tennis meal to prepare, hundreds of kilograms of mussels to wash and more than 200 people to serve.
At home, the garden needs attention, the swimming pool must be prepared for winter, and the windows are waiting to be cleaned.
And somewhere among all of that, I would like to enjoy a little of my holiday.
Perhaps we will visit the spa in Germany. Perhaps we will go to Strasbourg and experience the Titanic through virtual reality, followed by a nice restaurant.
Or perhaps we will simply stay at home and finish the things that need to be done.
When Janita wished me a lovely spa day and an enjoyable Titanic trip, I had to correct her.
“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.”
Because with our family, you never quite know what the week will bring.
But first, we have 200 kilograms of mussels to think about.
Member Stories
Respect Is Not a Rank.
Good manners are easy to talk about. The harder question is what remains when politeness, authority and real respect stop being the same thing.
By Fabrice, France.
Janita asked me a simple question: three people arrive at a door at exactly the same time. Who goes first?
Apparently this requires a committee meeting.
The obvious answer depends on who the three people are. If somebody is older, perhaps you let that person go ahead. If there is a woman, you may hold the door. If somebody says, “You go first,” then you can go first. What I do not like is the person who simply decides, without looking at anybody else, I am first.
Maybe that is where manners begin. Not with a complicated rule, but with noticing that another person is there.
Janita then made the mistake of asking whether I myself have good manners. This became dangerous territory. She was diplomatic at first. When she met me, she said, I was very well behaved. Then, as she got to know me better, she discovered that I was “a bit rough around the edges.”
The Mayor understood immediately.
“And then it went downhill from there.”
Janita had an even better description: the angel falling from the tree.
So there we are. This is my reputation now.
You say hello.
When I was growing up, many of these things were never explained as rules. You simply learned them because everybody around you behaved that way. You greeted people. You helped older people. If you met somebody in the village, you did not walk past as though they were invisible.
You said hello.
Of course, saying hello could be dangerous. The person might start talking and not stop, and then you suddenly remembered that you had something extremely urgent to do somewhere else. But you still greeted them.
When Janita described where she lives in South Africa, the picture was a little different. She greets the neighbours she knows, but many people come and go. Some she knows well enough to stop and talk to, others get a wave, and many simply mind their own business.
Perhaps that is more common now. When I was young, family, neighbours and friends were simply part of ordinary life. You did not always have to organise something in order to see people.
They were already there.
Leave your brain outside.
The conversation eventually reached the army, where the rules change very quickly.
My memory of the beginning is almost: Leave your brain outside. We will give it back to you later.
You arrive as a young man and, for the first months, you accept the system because you are there. You are not going home simply because somebody has told you to do something you do not like. The beginning was hard. After a while, it became normal.
You arrive as a young man and, for the first months, you accept the system because you are there.
Something else happens during that time too. Everybody starts in roughly the same situation. One man may be better at one thing, somebody else at another, but you are in the same group and facing the same problems. Later, when you find yourself far away from home, the reason for helping somebody becomes very different from village life.
In a village, you may help because the person is a neighbour, a friend or somebody you have known for years. In the military, you can find yourself depending on somebody you would never otherwise have met.
If there is trouble, you help each other.
You have to.
That is no longer really about politeness. It is about knowing that another person may depend on you — and that one day you may depend on him.
The rank and the person.
Then Janita asked whether rank automatically deserves respect.
The answer is yes and no.
You respect the rank because that is part of the system. But respecting the rank is not necessarily the same thing as respecting the person.
During military life I saw officers who were competent and officers who were not. The same was true lower down the hierarchy. A title on somebody’s uniform tells you their position. It does not automatically tell you whether they are good at what they do, how they treat people or what kind of person they are.
Those are different things.
This naturally became an excellent excuse for the conversation to collapse into a discussion about who holds the highest rank inside a marriage. The theory offered at the table was simple: a soldier’s wife is always one rank higher than the soldier.
Janita admitted that she probably has the higher rank in her household, although she also complained that she gets overruled quite often.
Tell me why.
For me, there is another kind of respect that matters just as much: explanation.
If somebody tells me to wait, I can wait. But I will probably ask why.
If there is a sensible reason, then fine. Perhaps something has happened. Perhaps there is a problem on a site. Perhaps somebody cannot continue until something else is finished. Once I understand the situation, I can usually accept it.
What bothers me is when somebody behaves as though your time has no value at all. You arrive, nobody speaks to you, nobody explains anything and you simply stand there.
It is not really the waiting that annoys me. It is the attitude behind it.
A reason changes the situation because it recognises that another person exists. It says, in effect: I know you are waiting. I know this affects you. This is what has happened.
Sometimes that is enough.
The same is true when somebody makes a mistake. I have made plenty. The important thing is to learn from it and, ideally, not make exactly the same mistake again. Somebody can explain a rule to you ten times, but sometimes you understand it properly only after you have done it wrong yourself.
Rules tell you what you are supposed to do.
Experience tells you why.
What I would bring back.
At the end, Janita asked what old habit I would bring back if I could choose one. Not a law, and not something people should be forced to do. Just something we once did more naturally.
For me, it would be spending time together.
Years ago, families, friends and neighbours would meet in the evening. The adults sat around a table, talked, ate, drank or played cards while the children played together. It was not a special occasion. Nobody needed to create a WhatsApp group, compare five calendars and book Saturday evening three months in advance.
People simply came together.
Today we have televisions, mobile phones and plenty of other ways to keep ourselves busy inside our own little worlds. You can have several people sitting in the same room while each of them is somewhere else.
That does not mean everything was better in the past. It was not. And I am certainly not going to pretend that I have spent my entire life behaving like an angel. According to Janita, that angel fell out of the tree some time ago.
But perhaps respect was never really about knowing exactly who should walk through the door first.
It was about noticing that somebody else had reached the door too.
And perhaps that is still enough.
Hold it open.
At The Table
Ladies First, Age Before Beauty, or Rock-Paper-Scissors?
There are many ways to begin a conversation about good manners. You could discuss who should hold the door open, whether older people deserve special treatment, or why some people believe ladies should always go first.
By Rosii in Sao Paulo, Monica in Adelaide, Janita in South Africa and The Mayor in the luggage hold of a spaceship bound for Mars.
Or you could spend half an hour trying to get everyone into a Zoom meeting.
That was how Lunch began this week.
Fruitloop was already there, but the website was refusing to cooperate. Monica couldn’t get in. Rosii couldn’t get in. The Mayor, rather mysteriously, could get into everything. Messages were pinging without appearing, browsers were being changed, and links were travelling around the world without taking anybody where they were supposed to go.
At one point, the Mayor considered creating an entirely new meeting called Emergency Lunch. Eventually, Fruitloop found the proper Zoom link and sent it to everyone. The Mayor discovered that he had been distributing the wrong one.
He admitted his mistake, declared Fruitloop the more intelligent of the two, and welcomed everyone to a rather late Lunch.
Monica thanked Fruitloop for rescuing the meeting. Fruitloop observed that technology doesn’t always work with them. The Mayor seemed inclined to agree, although he was still trying to understand why the website liked him and nobody else.
For a conversation called Who Goes First?, it was a promising beginning. Nobody had managed to arrive in the proper order because nobody could find the door.
The trouble with being too polite.
Before anyone reached an imaginary doorway, Monica had a story about two very real dogs.
She had taken Lily and Tobias to the groomer. Normally, their appointments cost about $130 each. This time, the groomer sent a message saying the arrangement would be approximately 530.
Monica nearly fell off her chair. Had dog grooming suddenly become an extraordinarily expensive profession?
When she collected the beautifully groomed dogs, she discovered that 530 had nothing to do with money. The groomer meant approximately 5:30 in the afternoon.
A few missing characters had turned a perfectly ordinary collection time into a financial emergency.
It was a lovely little example of how easily we misunderstand one another, especially when we cannot hear someone’s voice or see their expression. The words might be correct, but the meaning can still go wandering off in another direction.
Then Rosii mentioned her approaching birthday. Her niece had reminded her that in three years she would be sixty, which had prompted some reflection about everything she had experienced.
There had been good things and not-so-good things, she said, but it was her life, and she was happy with it. She had her health, her family, her work and plenty still to do.
In Brazil, she explained, there is an expression about becoming better with age, like wine.
The Mayor and Monica were delighted. Both were already on the other side of sixty, and neither seemed particularly interested in returning. Monica suggested sixty was the new fifty. The Mayor thought that was unnecessarily modest. Why not the better forties?
Fruitloop contributed the story of her grandmother, who had simply stopped counting at fifty-five. She was now somewhere in her seventies, but if anyone asked her age, the answer remained fifty-five.
This was when the Mayor took the topic of going first in a rather darker direction. As the oldest person at the table, he reasoned, he would probably be the first to depart this world.
Rosii immediately wanted to know where, exactly, they were supposed to be going.
It was a reasonable question.
Fruitloop decided it was time to introduce the first ridiculous problem before the Mayor organised his own farewell ceremony.
Imagine two extremely polite people arriving at a doorway at precisely the same moment. Both insist that the other should go first. Neither will surrender. Three hours later, they are still standing outside.
How do they settle it?
Monica’s answer was rock, paper, scissors. Rosii knew a Brazilian variation using fingers and numbers. Fruitloop proposed a race away from the door and back again, with the winner earning the right to enter.
Fruitloop proposed a race away from the door and back again, with the winner earning the right to enter.
The Mayor immediately complicated matters by introducing an imaginary 95-year-old person with a walking frame. Would Fruitloop still insist on a running competition?
Of course not, she said. She would let the older person go first.
But that raised another problem. Was she being kind, or was she making assumptions about somebody’s abilities?
The Mayor had his own solution. He would tell such an extraordinarily boring story, in such a monotonous voice, that the other person would eventually give up and walk through the door simply to escape.
Fruitloop was unimpressed.
Monica suggested tossing a coin, which sounded wonderfully sensible until somebody remembered how rarely people carry cash anymore.
Fruitloop checked her handbag and triumphantly produced a two-rand coin. The Mayor inspected it and wanted to know whether she had manufactured it herself.
The coin had been minted in 2023. Fruitloop had not personally made it.
From there, the conversation travelled from Australian banking charges to cash discounts, and then to a surprisingly modern development in asking strangers for money.
Rosii described stopping at a traffic light in Brazil, where a man asked her for money. When she said she had no cash, he suggested she could send him money electronically using Pix.
Fruitloop had encountered something similar in South Africa. Someone asking her for money had informed her that electronic transfers were also accepted.
Even the old excuse of having no cash was apparently becoming obsolete.
All this because two imaginary people couldn’t decide who should walk through a door.
A queen, an older gentleman and an inflatable duck.
Fruitloop’s next question offered everyone considerably more power.
Suppose you woke up tomorrow as the Queen of All Queens, or the King of All Kings, and could introduce one completely ridiculous law about standing in a queue. What would it be?
Fruitloop had recently seen a video of a woman who was tired of people standing too close behind her. The woman had brought an inflatable duck-shaped swimming ring into the queue and pumped it up around herself.
Nobody could get near her.
Fruitloop rather liked the principle. Her law would be simple: leave people some space. There was no need to stand practically on top of the person in front of you.
Rosii had another priority. If she was queen, particularly on her birthday, she wanted her turn respected. Nobody should push ahead of her.
This became complicated when the Mayor pointed out that he was older than Rosii. Surely age deserved some consideration?
Rosii agreed that older people should be respected. Her mother had taught her that. On an ordinary day, she might happily let him go first.
But on her birthday, as Queen of All Queens?
Sorry, Mr. Mayor. Today was her turn.
The Mayor protested that he was older. Rosii reminded him that he was also a man, and ladies traditionally went first.
Suddenly, a simple queue had acquired several competing systems of authority. There was age, gender, royal status, birthday privilege and the ordinary business of waiting your turn.
Which rule was supposed to win?
The Mayor was beginning to suspect that every possible answer placed him at the back of the queue.
The conversation then took an unexpected detour through the animal kingdom.
He told everyone about Uno, one of his cats, who had disappeared while the Mayor was away in Strasbourg. After discovering that Uno was still missing the following morning, he went looking and eventually heard a very loud meow coming from a neighbour’s barn.
Uno was rescued, brought home and presented with food, which he attacked with great enthusiasm. Afterwards, he cuddled up to the Mayor, apparently grateful for his release.
Monica supplied a familiar observation: dogs have masters, but cats have staff.
The Mayor realised that his position had become even worse. Monica, with her dogs, was a master. He, with his cats, was a member of staff. Rosii was a queen. Fruitloop was issuing the questions.
He was older, male and now apparently employed by three cats.
There seemed very little chance of him going first anywhere.
Three seats to Mars.
For the final Fruitloop question, the four Lunch companions were preparing to board a spaceship to Mars.
Unfortunately, the spaceship had only three proper seats. The fourth traveller would have to spend the journey in the luggage compartment.
Who should go there, and how would they decide?
The Mayor immediately volunteered himself. He was, after all, already at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Why prolong the discussion?
But Monica had a more practical approach. Surely the smallest person would fit into the luggage compartment most comfortably.
This required everyone to reveal their height.
Monica was 163 centimetres tall. Rosii was 174. The Mayor was 184.
Fruitloop was 159.
There was a short silence in which Fruitloop discovered that being the youngest and shortest person at the table had suddenly become a serious disadvantage.
Monica added that Fruitloop was probably the most flexible too.
Fruitloop was beginning to regret inventing this question.
She agreed that perhaps she could manage the luggage compartment, provided she had food, some room to move and a suitable spacesuit. After all, nobody was going to remain strapped into a seat for the entire journey.
The Mayor refused to allow his wing woman to spend months or years in a cold, dark compartment. He insisted that his upbringing required him to behave like a gentleman.
Then Rosii volunteered.
She practised yoga, she explained, and was flexible enough to manage.
The Mayor refused that offer too.
Monica briefly considered sacrificing herself, reasoning that the others might enjoy a peaceful journey without her constant chatter. But she was worried about the darkness. Would there be a torch that lasted for two years?
By now, everybody had found a reason either to volunteer or to prevent somebody else from volunteering.
Nobody wanted to be selfish, but nobody could agree on what being fair actually meant.
Fruitloop finally proposed a solution.
They would divide the journey into four parts. Everyone would take a turn in the luggage compartment, and rock, paper, scissors would determine the order.
It was wonderfully democratic.
There was just one problem. The Mayor remembered that he and Fruitloop had once used rock, paper, scissors to make decisions, but they kept choosing exactly the same thing. They could play for hours without reaching a result.
At this rate, the spaceship might arrive on Mars before anyone decided who belonged in the luggage compartment.
And then the Mayor raised a question nobody had considered.
Who was actually going to fly the spaceship?
Fruitloop assumed they would have a trained astronaut.
It seemed a sensible precaution.
The rules we carry with us.
What made this Lunch conversation so entertaining was that everyone had a slightly different idea of what good behaviour required.
For Monica, holding a door open remained a lovely gesture. She liked the courtesy of it, although she wondered whether some men now hesitated because they were afraid the gesture might be misunderstood.
For Rosii, respect for older people was something she had learned from her mother. Yet she could also imagine a birthday when she wanted to claim her own place at the front.
Fruitloop cared about personal space and finding a solution that allowed everyone a fair turn.
And the Mayor, despite his considerable enjoyment of complaining about being the oldest man in the room, kept returning to the idea that a gentleman should put others first.
None of these rules was particularly strange on its own. The trouble began when they met one another.
Does the oldest person go first, or the birthday girl? Does the gentleman hold the door, or does the woman prefer to open it herself? Should the smallest traveller squeeze into the luggage compartment, or should everyone share the inconvenience?
Sometimes the kindest thing is to step aside. Sometimes it is to accept an invitation. And sometimes, after three hours of excessive politeness, somebody simply needs to walk through the door.
By the end of Lunch, Rosii really did have to leave first. It was nearly eight in the morning in Brazil, and she had somewhere to be. In Australia, Monica was already well into her evening. Fruitloop and the Mayor were somewhere between the two.
Even the clocks had their own ideas about who was first.
Rosii had earlier described getting older as becoming like a good wine. Perhaps good manners improve in much the same way. We learn the rules when we are young, but understanding when to use them, when to bend them and when to laugh at them takes a little longer.
And if all else fails, there is always rock, paper, scissors.
Just make sure everyone agrees on the rules before the spaceship takes off.
At The Table
Good Manners Travel Well.
An imagined visit between Bangalore and Campo Grande begins with questions about etiquette and ends somewhere simpler: notice the people, make them comfortable, and adapt.
By Ismar, Campo Grande, Brazil and Ritesh, Bangalore, India.
The plan was deliberately dangerous.
Ismar and Amélia would travel from Brazil to visit Ritesh and his wife in Bangalore. Then Ritesh and his wife would make the return journey to Campo Grande. Nobody was actually booking a flight. The idea was to walk through the visits step by step and discover all the unwritten rules waiting to trip them up.
Who meets whom at the airport? Do you shake hands or kiss? Do you take your shoes off? What happens if somebody refuses food? Who chooses the restaurant? Who pays? How do you behave around an elderly relative? At what point may a guest open the fridge without asking?
Two countries, two cultures, two couples. Surely there would be trouble somewhere.
There was surprisingly little.
Start with the airport.
Ritesh began by imagining Ismar and Amélia arriving in Bangalore after a long journey. His first instinct was not etiquette but care.
He would meet them at the airport. Because they were arriving for the first time and he would be excited to welcome them, he might bring a bouquet of flowers. Then he would start thinking about whether they were tired and, very quickly, whether they were hungry.
“I don’t think we are doing anything special,” he said. The aim would simply be to make their stay “comfortable and easy.”
There was already one misunderstanding, though. The imagined visitors had apparently booked a hotel.
Ritesh had not imagined that at all.
His assumption had been that Ismar and Amélia would stay in his flat.
That small difference was revealing. Before anyone had reached questions of handshakes, footwear or table manners, hospitality had already expanded from airport collection to accommodation. Ritesh had enough room, so why would his guests be somewhere else?
Campo Grande produced almost the same answer in a different form.
If he had the time, Ismar would also go to the airport himself. If work made that impossible for somebody else, a family member might collect foreign visitors instead. The first practical question in his mind was not ceremony but luggage: could four people and all the suitcases actually fit into his car?
If not, he said, it would simply be “something to solve at the moment.”
No bouquet in Brazil, perhaps. Flowers at the airport did not strike Ismar as particularly usual. A small local souvenir was more familiar.
Different object. Same message: you have arrived, and we were expecting you.
Shoes off, coffee on.
At Ritesh’s flat, the first visible difference would appear at the door.
Shoes normally come off.
There is a rack outside or near the entrance, and the visitors would follow the household inside without them. Once seated, they would be offered water and perhaps tea, coffee or something small to eat. They would be shown the bathroom, told where things were and given the chance to freshen up after the journey.
The purpose, again, was straightforward: “make sure that they feel home and comfortable at home.”
For Ismar, removing his shoes presented no philosophical difficulty.
In Brazil, he said, people normally enter a house wearing them, even though he sometimes takes his own shoes off when he is alone. But if Bangalore requires shoes at the door, that is easy enough.
“In Rome, like the Romans.”
Back in Campo Grande, the sequence sounded strikingly familiar. Find somewhere sensible for the suitcases. Offer water. Offer coffee.
Tea would be less likely, Ismar explained. Coffee is far more common.
The differences were real, but oddly modest. Nobody was facing a ceremonial minefield. Mostly there were shoes, drinks and the question of whether somebody needed the bathroom.
The dangerous business of feeding people.
Food looked more promising as a source of cultural collision.
Ismar imagined offering afternoon pão de queijo, Brazilian cheese bread, perhaps with coffee. At home it could simply be eaten with the hands.
Ritesh saw no difficulty.
“We are not going to say no, thank you,” he said. They would try it.
Eating with the hands, in fact, sounded reassuring. Ritesh is accustomed to doing that with Indian food and is aware that in some settings people can judge the practice. Knowing that eating something by hand would not automatically cause discomfort removed one possible worry.
The reverse journey required more preparation.
Ismar does not cope well with heavily spiced food. Amélia can manage rather more, but he was clear about his own limit. If everything available were very spicy, he joked in effect, hunger might be preferable. Eating an unfamiliar meal with his hands would also make him uncomfortable.
Ismar does not cope well with heavily spiced food. Amélia can manage rather more, but he was clear about his own limit. If everything available were very spicy, he joked in effect, hunger might be preferable. Eating an u
Ritesh’s answer was not that a visitor should learn to cope.
A suitable restaurant would be chosen around the guests: what they eat, what they avoid, whether they can tolerate chilli and what they actually want to try. A good restaurant would have spoons and forks available anyway.
The rule turned out not to be “When in India, eat like an Indian.”
It was closer to: when somebody has travelled thousands of kilometres to see you, make sure they can eat dinner.
Even refusing food produced less drama than expected.
Suppose Ismar was sitting in Ritesh’s home and was offered something to eat. He said clearly, “No, thank you.”
Would that be insulting?
Ritesh thought about the possible reasons. Perhaps Ismar was not hungry. Perhaps he did not know what the dish contained. Perhaps it was too spicy. Perhaps he simply did not want it.
“There might be several scenarios.”
They might ask whether he wanted something different, but his refusal would not be taken as a personal rejection.
Intent mattered more than ritual.
Then comes the bill.
Restaurants offered another chance for trouble.
In Campo Grande, Ismar would first think about what his visitors could eat. Ritesh is vegetarian; his wife eats some meat but not beef. A Brazilian barbecue, despite being an obvious local experience, would therefore not necessarily be the sensible choice.
Ismar might suggest fish or chicken and help with an unfamiliar Portuguese menu.
And the bill?
“As they are my guests, I would pay the bill.”
Ritesh saw nothing uncomfortable in that. If Ismar had invited them and chosen the restaurant on their first outing, being treated as his guests seemed entirely natural.
Then the scene moved to Bangalore.
Ritesh would select somewhere according to what Ismar and Amélia were comfortable eating, but also according to what he himself could realistically afford. The host should not choose an extravagant restaurant and then hope everybody splits the bill.
“We know that we can go somewhere that we can take care of them.”
He would recommend dishes. His wife could help with non-vegetarian choices because he could not honestly recommend food he does not eat himself. The visitors could accept or refuse the suggestions.
At the end, Ritesh would pay.
Again, two countries had managed to produce almost the same rule independently.
If you invite the guests out, you look after them.
Respect without a manual.
Age seemed likely to expose a deeper difference.
Ismar described visiting his mother, who is in her late eighties. He does not fundamentally change the way he speaks to her, but he does use senhora, a respectful form of address. His younger sister does not necessarily do the same.
For Ismar it is a personal expression of respect rather than a complicated social performance.
Ritesh explained that in India, addressing older people often begins from a different instinct. Someone noticeably older may naturally become “uncle” or “auntie,” even without a family relationship.
“It’s just in our blood,” he said.
Nobody teaches a child a detailed international rulebook for this. The language emerges from the social environment. Then, when travelling elsewhere, the person has to notice that the same form may not work.
Faced with Ismar’s mother in Brazil, Ritesh would therefore have to think. His automatic instinct might be to use the respectful relationship language familiar from India, while the situation itself might call for her name or whatever Ismar indicated was appropriate.
The interesting thing was not that the rules differed.
It was that Ritesh expected to adjust.
When guests stop being guests.
The imagined holiday eventually reached one week.
By then, flowers had faded, suitcases had been unpacked and everybody knew where the bathroom was. The more interesting question became what happens when visitors begin living inside somebody else’s ordinary routine.
Could Ritesh open Ismar’s fridge? Could Ismar make coffee in Ritesh’s kitchen without asking? Could somebody disappear for the afternoon? Could a guest simply announce that he was tired and go to bed?
Both households were relaxed about most of it.
Ismar would not impose many restrictions. His concern was ordinary domestic consideration: do not make a great deal of noise late at night. He usually goes to bed before eleven. A guest operating on a completely different timetable might disturb him, although for one week he would probably tolerate rather more than usual.
Ritesh was equally relaxed about guests helping themselves to something from the fridge or making tea or coffee.
He and his wife would probably keep trying to serve them anyway.
The one thing he would appreciate was information. If Ismar and Amélia went out, particularly if they might return late or not come back that evening, tell the hosts.
Not because permission was required.
Because the hosts would be waiting, perhaps preparing food, and wondering whether their guests were safe.
That distinction may be the closest the conversation came to defining its own unwritten rule.
Courtesy was not obedience.
It was consideration.
The rules between people.
The journey had begun with the expectation that Brazil and India would expose a long list of incompatible manners.
There were differences.
Flowers in Bangalore, perhaps a souvenir in Brazil. Shoes off here, shoes on there. Coffee more readily than tea. More or less chilli. Hands, forks, spoons. Senhora, uncle, auntie. Different habits around greeting and different assumptions about what a visitor already knows.
But none of them looked particularly dangerous once the people involved were allowed to speak.
Ismar could remove his shoes.
Ritesh could use a knife and fork.
A restaurant could be chosen around what the guests actually eat.
Food could be declined without creating an international incident.
The host could explain what needed explaining and let the visitor discover the rest.
And if somebody did not know what to do, there was always the oldest piece of social technology available: look around and see what everybody else is doing.
Ritesh remembered doing exactly that when he first encountered unfamiliar table manners. He watched other people use the cutlery and learned from them.
Perhaps that is why the great Brazil–India etiquette clash never arrived.
The imagined visit kept returning to the same ordinary behaviours: ask, notice, explain, accommodate, recommend, warn, pay attention.
Know enough to prepare.
Be flexible enough to change the plan.
And when necessary, do as the Romans do.
Column
The Human Bit.
By Frank Peters
Two trees share the light.
Neither asks the other one
to move out of the way.
At The Table
Was That Friendly, or Was I Just Insulted?
North Hesse has apple wine, difficult hills, dangerous levels of friendliness and its own ideas about coffee. But once the jokes about regional character are exhausted, a simpler rule begins to emerge: perhaps politeness belongs less to places than to people.
By The Swimming Club, Manfred and Martin, both in Northern Hessen. (You have been warned).
There are certain precautions a visitor should apparently take before entering Hesse.
According to Manfred, do not expect deep, meaningful conversations. Hessians are stubborn. There is Handkäs. There is Aaleworscht. And do not make the elementary mistake of assuming that because Kassler sounds like Kassel, you will necessarily find what you are looking for when you get there.
Martin added another warning: Hessians are always right.
They are also capable of offering you wine which turns out to be made from apples. Other people might call this cider. In Hesse, this is apparently cunning.
By the time the opening warnings were finished, the verdict was becoming difficult to avoid. Viewed from the correct angle, Hessians are a thoroughly devious bunch of people. North Hesse has the additional distinction of sometimes being described as the Siberia of Hesse, with its own weather, its own hills and, judging by the conversation, quite possibly its own laws of human behaviour.
None of this was particularly encouraging for somebody trying to discover what counts as polite in different places.
Then again, that may have been the point.
Extremely friendly people.
Ask somebody when a stranger was unexpectedly nice to them, and you might expect a touching story.
Manfred took a more cautious view. Such moments exist, he said. One is surprised by them. We have to learn to cope.
Martin’s example was even more alarming: drivers who actually use their brains. Perhaps, he suggested, there should be a Nobel Prize for Road Behaviour.
That brought the conversation naturally to England, where Martin had noticed something deeply suspicious. The drivers really were polite. They kept their distance and drove sensibly rather than, as he put it in German, like a scalded pig — flat out and without much apparent concern for anybody else.
Worse still, the politeness continued away from the road.
German even has the wonderfully suspicious expression der ist scheiss freundlich — roughly, “he’s bloody friendly.” There comes a point, apparently, when friendliness itself begins to look questionable.
North Hesse, fortunately, provides plenty of distractions. There are forests, hills and national parks. The Brothers Grimm lived in Kassel for a number of years, which was immediately accepted as proof that the region has contributed substantially to global education. Near Manfred there is even a village associated with Cinderella.
So North Hesse is well worth visiting.
Assuming, naturally, that you can afford the travel-insurance surcharge.
There are the Kassel hills to consider. Manfred pulls a caravan through them and maintains that this is more difficult than driving through the Alps. The Swiss, after all, invented tunnels. North Hesse appears to have preferred character building. Since Manfred would quite like an electric car, hauling a caravan up and down those hills gives him something further to think about.
Then there is the weather. Martin thought his part of Hesse had more in common with Scotland. Manfred considered the climate in South Hesse unbearable, while the weather in North Hesse simply is what it is.
Weather itself did not survive much scrutiny. The higher you climb a mountain, the colder it gets despite moving closer to the sun. Snow can fall on Mount Etna in Sicily, volcano permitting. A Scottish acquaintance once travelled from Inverness to Edinburgh and then flew to Frankfurt, leaving 26 degrees behind and arriving to 42. Manfred had experienced the opposite sort of surprise on a drive to Lake Garda: pleasant temperatures at home, an air-conditioned journey south, then the car door opening onto a wall of heat.
A Scottish acquaintance once travelled from Inverness to Edinburgh and then flew to Frankfurt, leaving 26 degrees behind and arriving to 42.
There are, clearly, local disturbances.
But underneath the weather, apple wine, road behaviour and jokes about Hessian character, a problem was beginning to appear. Every attempt to establish a regional rule of politeness seemed to produce an exception.
Then coffee provided some actual evidence.
The coffee test.
During the conversation, Manfred was at home in Bad Wildungen. At some point, he left the table to get himself a coffee.
Martin was in Kassel. The Mayor was in Cleebourg.
Neither was offered one.
They had to ask Manfred whether he might bring them a coffee too.
There it was: an unwritten rule discovered at the exact moment somebody broke it.
An Englishman, it was decided, would also have offered biscuits.
Manfred mounted a defence. There had been technical difficulties. He was combining human extraction with fresh input. This demonstrated that men in Hesse are perfectly capable of multitasking, even when they do not entirely understand that they are doing it.
Getting yourself a coffee without offering anybody else one is hardly a major international incident, of course. That is precisely what makes these rules interesting. Politeness tends to live in small things: offering, waiting, leaving enough distance, knowing whether shoes stay on or come off, judging when a telephone call is acceptable, understanding whether somebody’s bluntness means hostility or simply that this is how they speak.
Often, the rule becomes visible only when somebody misses it.
Yet performing every rule correctly does not necessarily make somebody pleasant. Martin and Manfred both knew the opposite experience: a person can behave impeccably and still feel cold. Beneath the rituals, another calculation is taking place.
Can I warm to this person? Are we on the same wavelength?
For Manfred, that can matter more than whether somebody has executed every small ceremony of politeness correctly.
The reverse is possible too. Somebody can make a terrible first impression, miss the expected rules and become likeable remarkably quickly. An immediate apology changes things. Humour helps. Sometimes a second chance is enough.
The rules matter.
Just apparently not quite as much as we imagine.
People, not regions.
Travel eventually dismantled what remained of the theory.
Manfred has spent time in France and does not recognise the supposed difficulty between Germans and French people. His experience has been much simpler: most people want to live in peace and get along.
The same has been true elsewhere. He has travelled in places sometimes described by others as dangerous and has generally found people friendly. He is careful about what that proves — these were journeys and holiday destinations, not a scientific survey of humanity — but over time he has developed a straightforward approach.
How you present yourself tends to be reflected back to you.
“We are ruled by prejudices,” he said. “Reality presents a different picture.”
So the conversation tried to force a decision. Suppose somebody had to choose where to live purely according to how pleasant strangers seemed. The Netherlands, Croatia, France or Hesse. Who survives the first round?
Manfred wanted to know how many rounds there were.
Then he ruined the competition.
All of them.
Based on his own experience of how people approached and interacted with him, he could not choose a region. It came down to the people, not the place. Introducing bureaucracy, neighbours and supermarket queues failed to produce a winner either.
In Austria, Manfred once received a parking ticket after stopping briefly to buy an ice cream for his wife. He paid it and moved on. On another journey, he was caught speeding shortly before entering Italy and had to pay at the border.
Supermarkets, meanwhile, appear to have achieved something approaching European unity: wherever possible, open as few checkouts as possible and extend the customer experience.
Perhaps that is the true shared culture.
Even New York, which Martin initially experienced as hectic, did not strike him as unfriendly. Life simply moved quickly. Once he adjusted his own speed, the place became easier to read.
That may be closer to the truth than most national stereotypes. Places have rhythms. If you mistake the rhythm of a place for the character of its people, you can get them badly wrong.
And exaggerated friendliness can be every bit as uncomfortable as bluntness.
The hole in the sock.
Some social rules remain wonderfully specific.
In Japan, Manfred noted, a visitor may be expected to remove their shoes when entering somebody’s home. He does not normally do that himself, so the request would surprise him.
It becomes particularly problematic if there is a hole in the sock.
Germany has its own rules. For years, one was simple: do not disturb a German between eight and eight-fifteen in the evening. That was television news time. The habit may have weakened, but some trace of the unwritten law remains.
Manfred sometimes wants to telephone somebody and is told by his wife that he cannot possibly call at that particular moment because of some social convention.
His response is more pragmatic.
Call them.
If you are disturbing them, they can tell you.
Otherwise, he argued, eventually you cannot do anything at all because you are too busy worrying about whether you are allowed to speak to people.
Which leaves the visitor nervously approaching North Hesse with rather a lot to remember: offer coffee, consider the biscuits, think carefully about the shoes, avoid television news time, distrust the apple wine and prepare emotionally for the weather.
Manfred’s final advice was considerably simpler.
Behave normally, as you would elsewhere. Let people be who they are and adapt to the person in front of you. If the chemistry works, fine. If it does not, then so be it.
After an hour of attempting to discover the correct rules of politeness, that was perhaps the most useful result.
Beneath all the local customs, habits and misunderstandings, the rule that matters most is not especially Hessian, German, English, French or Japanese.
It is human.
Visual pauseThe Pineapple
Essay
What Are We Going to Do About It?
AI can widen our choices, sharpen our questions and help us see connections. The harder question is what we choose to do with them.
By Bruce Lloyd, London with Frank Peters, Cleebourg.
Near the end of a conversation that had ranged across AI, trust, money, language, power, politics and the odd detour into history, I found myself making a slightly uncomfortable admission.
I have spent a lot of my life writing about issues and talking about them. I have spent rather less time going out and actually doing something about them. I have never been a great one for joining demonstrations or becoming deeply involved in politics. I might pretend that I am a thinker, I said, but perhaps I also have to admit that I am not really a doer.
Frank immediately challenged me.
If I had done nothing, he pointed out, I would not have become a professor. I would not have been involved in industry, research and all the other things that have filled my working life. Perhaps, then, the distinction is not really between thinking and doing.
The more interesting question may be what happens to our thinking once we have done it.
And who notices.
The problem with power.
We had arrived there by a rather circuitous route, which is not unusual in our conversations. We begin somewhere, throw ideas backwards and forwards, and occasionally discover afterwards that there was a thread running through the whole thing.
This time, one of those threads was power.
Frank had been playing with three expressions: the power of language, the power of money and the power of people. Put them into a Venn diagram, he suggested, and the word sitting in the middle would simply be power.
That reminded me of something I had written about many years ago: power is the ability to make things happen. Responsibility asks a different question — in whose interest do you make them happen?
I have a shelf full of books about power. Many are concerned with how you acquire it and how you prevent other people taking it away from you. What has always interested me is how rarely responsibility appears alongside it. At the other end of the bookshelf are books about corporate social responsibility which, in turn, often seem curiously reluctant to talk about power.
Yet surely the two belong together. Power without responsibility can become very self-focused. Once responsibility enters the equation, we are forced to look beyond ourselves. Who benefits? Who pays? Who is heard, and who is ignored? What are the consequences of the thing we are trying to make happen?
That takes us rather quickly into technology.
There is enormous uneasiness around AI, and some of it is perfectly understandable. But it is often difficult to separate mistrust of the technology from mistrust of the people and organisations behind it. They are not necessarily the same thing.
Frank wondered whether AI has become a convenient scapegoat. Perhaps some of our anxiety comes from the fact that it exposes how much we do not know. Blaming the computer can be easier than examining the quality of our own thinking and questioning.
Blaming the computer can be easier than examining the quality of our own thinking and questioning.
My concern is slightly different. Technology does not exist separately from human motivation. However sophisticated the systems become, they are created, funded and operated inside organisations with their own pressures and interests.
We have seen something similar with social media. Platforms may speak about connection, openness and freedom of speech while operating within commercial systems that reward attention, growth and profit. The media itself faces comparable pressures. Controversy attracts attention. Polarisation attracts attention. Extremes attract attention.
Then we wonder why trust is declining.
There is a curious circle here. The more trust there is in a society, the less regulation people feel they need. As trust falls, we create more rules to control those operating at the limits of acceptable behaviour. More regulation brings more frustration, more lawyers and more attempts to find ways around the rules. Measures intended to restore confidence can end up reinforcing the feeling that nobody can be trusted.
There is no easy way out of that.
More choices, less focus.
AI introduces another paradox. It is enormously increasing the number of choices available to us.
At first sight, that sounds entirely positive: more information, more possibilities, more perspectives, more ways of approaching a problem. We can ask another question, investigate another angle, generate another alternative and compare another interpretation.
But doing something requires focus.
Human beings still have a finite amount of time. At some point we have to stop exploring and decide what matters. If the number of possibilities keeps growing, we may need considerably more discipline simply to decide where to put our attention.
That brought us back to priorities.
How do we know what is important? What matters to me may not matter to somebody else. Something that looks urgent may not be significant at all, while something happening quietly in the background may matter enormously. The thing making the greatest amount of noise is not necessarily the thing deserving the greatest amount of attention.
AI can help us examine those choices. I do not think it removes our responsibility for making them.
It may actually increase it.
A rather accidental career.
From there, the conversation became more personal. Frank asked whether I had considered myself ambitious during my career.
My answer was no, although I probably had what I called a kind of naive ambition. What I did not have was a particularly disciplined sense of direction. I was fortunate to find myself in the academic world almost by accident, and once I was there all sorts of things happened, many of them outside my control.
I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
That is rather different from the conventional story of success. We tend to admire people with a clearly defined focus. They know where they are going, set their goals and pursue them relentlessly. Often they are very successful.
But there may be a danger in defining success quite so narrowly. If the destination around which you have built your life suddenly becomes irrelevant or unobtainable, an extraordinary degree of focus can become a weakness.
Life is rarely entirely the result of one person’s plan anyway.
Careers develop through other people. Somebody sees something in you that they need. You see something in them. Opportunities emerge. Things are given and taken. Chance intervenes.
People intervene.
Frank and I did not know one another existed until an online platform happened to put us together. An algorithm created an introduction. A conversation followed, and then another.
Technology made the connection possible.
It did not decide what we would do with it.
The freedom of not having to do.
There is another dimension to the relationship between thinking and doing that becomes particularly interesting later in life.
For most of our working lives, earning a living forces us to be doers. We do things partly because somebody else needs them done. Our actions serve an organisation, a customer, a market or a profession.
Retirement changes that relationship. Suddenly you do not have to be driven by quite the same forces.
That creates freedom, but it can create frustration too. You may have more opportunity to think creatively and fewer structures compelling you to turn those thoughts into action. Meanwhile, somebody still working inside an organisation may experience the opposite problem: constant activity, yet a feeling that what they do is scarcely noticed or appreciated.
Neither condition is automatically satisfying.
Perhaps the important question is not whether we describe ourselves as thinkers or doers, but whether there is some relationship between the two.
Thinking without doing can become sterile. Doing without thinking can become dangerous.
The same is true of power. Power makes things happen. Responsibility asks why they should happen, and for whom.
Did we achieve anything?
Eventually we arrived at the slightly awkward question behind conversations such as ours.
Have we contributed anything useful?
Or are we simply two men sitting, metaphorically at least, on a Greek island drinking coffee and enjoying a conversation?
I am not sure we can know.
We certainly did something. We talked. We questioned each other. We occasionally disagreed. We followed ideas down unexpected paths and ended up in places neither of us had intended to visit when we began.
Whether that amounts to achieving something may not be entirely for us to decide.
Something we discuss may be read by somebody else and connect with another thought. It may alter a question they were asking or lead them to do something differently. We may never hear about it. That is one of our human limitations: we often do not know the effect of what we do because people do not tell us.
So I suggested a smaller test.
Had either of us left the conversation with an idea we did not have before?
The answer was yes.
That does not amount to changing the world. It does not even mean that either of us will behave differently tomorrow. But perhaps that is where the movement from thinking to doing begins.
And perhaps this is also where AI becomes most interesting. Not as the thing that gives us the answer, and certainly not as somewhere we can transfer responsibility, but as another participant in the movement between thought and action.
A human thought goes into the system. Another human questions it. AI helps organise, challenge or extend it. Something emerges on the other side and travels onwards.
What happens after that is much harder to
Recipe
Ralf’s Three-Helping Chickpea and Quinoa Salad
With feta, rocket and a wonderful honey-mustard dressing. A salad so good that even the barbecue meat had some serious competition.
Normally, when we have a barbecue with our friends, I am interested in the meat. A beautiful beef fillet, prepared properly, with the right seasoning and a good grill. That is my world.
But last weekend, our friend Petra brought a chickpea and quinoa salad to our Grillen mit Freunden barbecue. It was something different, with feta, fresh vegetables and a fantastic dressing made with honey, mustard, garlic, gherkins and dill.
I tried it. Then I took some more. And when everybody had finished eating, I went back for a third helping.
Petra was very happy because she had been a little unsure whether we would like it. Well, I think three helpings are a very good compliment!
I liked it so much that I took the recipe home and made it myself. And now I am planning to take it in our motorhome when we meet friends beside the River Elbe.
Here is the recipe. Very simple, very fresh, and really, really good.
Ingredients.
For 4 portions
150 g quinoa (uncooked)
½ cucumber
1 spring onion, or 1 small regular onion
1 handful fresh rocket (arugula)
1 tomato
½ bell pepper
150 g feta cheese
1 small tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
For the honey-mustard dressing.
Mustard
Olive oil
Honey
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Pickled gherkins
Garlic
Fresh dill
The original recipe does not give exact quantities for the dressing. I use the ingredients to taste and blend them together until I have a smooth, flavourful sauce. In our conversation, I mentioned using two gherkins.
Method
1. Cook the quinoa.
Prepare the quinoa according to the packet instructions. When it is cooked, leave it to cool completely. I don’t want hot quinoa making the fresh vegetables soft.
2. Prepare the vegetables.
Cut the cucumber, spring onion, tomato and bell pepper into small pieces. Crumble or dice the feta. Drain and rinse the chickpeas, then put everything into a large salad bowl. Keep the rocket aside for the moment.
3. Make the dressing.
Put the mustard, olive oil, honey, salt, pepper, gherkins, garlic and dill into a tall mixing container. Use a stick blender to purée everything into a dressing. Taste it and adjust the flavours as you like.
4. Bring everything together.
Gently fold the cooled quinoa into the vegetables, chickpeas and feta. Pour the dressing over the salad and mix everything carefully so the ingredients are evenly coated.
5. Add the rocket and serve.
I like to add the rocket shortly before serving, so the leaves stay fresh and don’t become wilted. Give everything a final gentle toss, and the salad is ready.
Ralf’s Kitchen Notes.
The dressing makes the difference. The combination of honey, mustard, gherkins, garlic and dill is unusual, but it works beautifully. The honey brings sweetness, the gherkins bring a little acidity, and the garlic and dill give it a wonderful fresh flavour.
Perfect for a barbecue. The salad is substantial enough to enjoy on its own, but it is also a fantastic accompaniment to grilled meat. And because the quinoa and chickpeas make it quite filling, you certainly won’t go hungry.
A good recipe travels. This is exactly the sort of salad I like to prepare for our motorhome trips. I can make the main salad in advance, keep it cool, and add the fresh rocket when we are ready to eat.
One thing I particularly enjoyed about our conversation was the question of whether taking three helpings of somebody else’s food is polite or impolite.
For me, the answer is very simple. When somebody makes something really fantastic, and I go back for more, that is a compliment to the cook.
And when everybody else says they are finished, I might still say, “Wait a moment. I need one more spoonful.”
That is exactly what happened with Petra’s salad.
Enjoy your meal!
Peeling Potatoes
Peeling Potatoes, Episode 69: Who Goes First at the Monster Café?
Ten monsters arrive at once. One of them is invisible. Kevin has eight tentacles. The Mayor has house rules. What could possibly go wrong?
By Peeling Potatoes– Janita and or Fruitloop, not a monster and The Mayor, aka Frank. A monster (the jury is still out on that one.)
It was 11:50 p.m. and Monster Café was about to open.
Every creature in the neighbourhood had finished work, and Kevin — our purple monster friend — was hosting the annual Monster Madness Mania, a celebration of the madness and silliness of living together in harmony.
He had also made one potentially catastrophic management decision.
He had appointed the Mayor as the café’s official Minister of Queue and Service Management.
The Mayor was less impressed by the title than I had hoped.
“Queue and Service Management?”
Yes.
Thousands of monsters were expected.
He sighed.
Then I gave him his first problem. Ten monsters arrive at exactly the same time.
Who goes first?
Monster decency.
The Mayor immediately wanted more information. Was there a follow-up question? Was I going to let him answer and then twist the whole scenario around?
I refused to reassure him.
So he went back to his old hotel days, remembering Sunday mornings when an entire hotel seemed to arrive for breakfast at once and then complained about having to queue. There was only so much capacity. Everybody could not go through the door at the same time.
The same applied to monsters.
As far as the Mayor was concerned, if there was no hierarchy, seniority or other reason to treat one differently, Monster Number One went through, followed by Monster Number Two, and so on. Everybody behaved themselves, filed through the door and got on with the evening.
“We were talking about manners yesterday,” he said. “I’m sure monsters have some form of manners we may not actually understand.”
Human decency, apparently, had acquired a supernatural branch.
Monster decency.
I made it harder. What if the hungriest monster wanted to go first?
No.
What if he was so hungry that he started eating the other monsters?
Still no.
We were talking about seconds rather than hours, the Mayor pointed out. Starting a fight outside the door would only delay everybody further.
“Go in. Behave yourself. Have a good time. Eat nicely. Eat well. Enjoy the food. Enjoy the ambiance.”
Surprisingly civilised advice for a building full of monsters.
Then Kevin arrived.
Kevin has eight tentacles. If he stands in a queue, I asked, does that mean he gets eight places?
The Mayor considered the anatomy rather than the philosophy.
“He’s only got one bum.”
And there it was: the first proper rule of Monster Café.
One bum, one place.
The invisible problem.
Things became more difficult when an invisible monster pushed to the front.
Was it rude if nobody could see who was doing it?
The Mayor thought about that one. Yes, it was still rude. The other monsters would know something was happening because they would suddenly find themselves being shoved out of the way. They simply would not be able to see the culprit.
That reminded him of a story.
Years ago, his wife and mother-in-law were waiting at a car park payment machine in Britain when a man marched from the back of the queue, pushed ahead of everyone, paid for his ticket and prepared to leave.
Someone objected.
“You’re going to have forgotten me by tomorrow,” the man apparently replied. “So why are you getting excited?”
There was, the Mayor admitted, a peculiar logic to it.
Unfortunately for the man, it did not work. The Mayor had not even been there and still remembered the story years later.
That may be one of the dangers of unwritten rules. You can break one and get exactly what you wanted. Nobody arrests you. Nobody issues a formal warning. There may be no visible consequence at all.
That may be one of the dangers of unwritten rules. You can break one and get exactly what you wanted. Nobody arrests you. Nobody issues a formal warning. There may be no visible consequence at all.
But people remember.
The invisible monster had an additional advantage. Even if everybody knew he was behaving badly, what exactly were they going to do about it?
Sometimes, the Mayor decided, you simply have to chalk something up to unpleasant behaviour and move on.
Take the monster off the Christmas card list.
Give him coal.
Assuming monsters celebrate Christmas.
We parked that question for another day.
Four egos and a tomato juice.
Next came Ignis the dragon, Vlad the vampire, Gargle the zombie and the Chicken King.
All four claimed they should be served first.
The Mayor refused to choose. If they were sitting at the same table in a good establishment, he argued, the kitchen should prepare the meals so that all four dishes arrived together.
“You’ve got to level the playing field.”
Rather than decide which claim deserved priority, remove the reason for the argument.
Then Dracula arrived.
He had been coming to Monster Café for 400 years and wanted his usual large tomato juice with extra ice. Unfortunately, there was a vampire queue and a tomato juice queue, and Dracula had no intention of joining either.
Four centuries of loyal custom, he felt, should count for something.
The Mayor disagreed. Being a regular did not automatically give Dracula the right to go first.
That did not mean he would make him queue.
This was where the neat little rulebook began to wobble.
Why waste everybody’s energy having a public argument with a difficult regular when a professional waiter would probably have seen Dracula enter, known exactly what he drank and had the tomato juice waiting before he reached the bar?
Make the drink. Add the ice. Take the money. Hopefully collect the tip.
If Dracula’s behaviour became a genuine problem, speak to him quietly later.
Not in front of everybody.
No spectacle. No grand battle over principle.
The rules had not disappeared. The Mayor simply did not believe every violation required a war.
Kevin finds a loophole.
Then Kevin discovered the flaw in my system.
He sent one tentacle to order a drink, another to the buffet for dessert, two more to reserve seats for friends, another to wave at a waiter, and used the remaining tentacles to hold positions in different queues.
“I’m not skipping the queue,” Kevin announced. “I’m participating in several queues at once.”
The other monsters were furious.
The Mayor was almost impressed.
Not by Kevin.
By the size of the design failure.
From a human point of view, Kevin’s particular trick was impossible. Humans do not generally possess eight independently deployable tentacles. But that was not really the point.
The loophole existed. Kevin had found it, and now he was exploiting it.
Was he clever or unfair?
Unfair, the Mayor decided. If one creature’s cleverness interfered with everybody else’s enjoyment, somebody had to intervene. Kevin would be told to stop. If necessary, he would be told twice. If he continued, matters would escalate.
And the loophole would be closed.
Then the Mayor contradicted himself.
“If there is a loophole, you use it until somebody closes it.”
I pointed out that this seemed convenient.
He agreed.
Then he corrected himself.
“It depends on the loophole.”
A legal or financial loophole somebody was perfectly entitled to use was one thing. A behavioural loophole that allowed one person to make life worse for everybody else was different.
My contribution was less morally sophisticated. If the loophole works in your favour, use it and do not tell anybody else.
The Mayor approved enthusiastically.
Monster Café was developing a slightly worrying ethical code.
The last chair.
By now every table was full.
There was one chair left, and approaching it were a 900-year-old witch whose feet hurt, a tiny zombie who had been standing for six hours, a dragon whose tail was blocking the emergency exit, and the Mayor, who had spent the entire evening standing up and solving everybody else’s problems.
Who deserved the chair?
The Mayor eliminated himself immediately. He was the co-host. Nobody cared that his feet hurt. That was part of the job.
He gave the chair to the witch.
The zombie could sit on the bar if he was tiny enough. The dragon could be moved away from the emergency exit. Both could have a drink on the house.
Everyone had not received the same thing, but everyone had been considered.
“That’s almost like bribery,” I said.
“A lot of it is.”
Then I told him the chair was not actually a chair.
It was a magical throne.
Whoever sat on it would become café manager and host of the next Monster Madness Mania.
Suddenly everybody wanted it.
Now who should sit down: the creature who needed the chair most, wanted it most, or would use its power most responsibly?
The Mayor did not hesitate.
The third.
Need and want could both cause trouble. A creature who could genuinely use power responsibly was much rarer.
That creature could have the chair.
Preferably forever.
The Mayor’s shift would be over.
The rulebook.
At the end of the evening, the café owner had had enough. She handed the Mayor a blank book.
Five rules, I told him.
Too many, and nobody would come back.
Too few, and Kevin might eat the furniture.
The Mayor began.
Rule One: Have a good time.
Rule Two: Respect the staff.
Rule Three: Respect the other guests.
Rule Four: We fulfil wonders immediately. Miracles take a little longer.
Rule Five was really the boundary around all the others: if you cannot accept the house rules, perhaps this is simply not the right café for you.
There are other cafés.
There are also, presumably, other monsters.
I had one final question.
Should rules change when they stop making sense?
“Definitely.”
Then the Mayor paused.
“The question is, who do they make sense to?”
Which rather ruined the beautiful simplicity of the question.
A rule can look outdated to the person writing it and perfectly sensible to the person relying on it. Change something too quickly and you may destroy exactly what people valued about it. Refuse to change at all and eventually the world moves around you.
So yes, you adapt. You develop. You innovate.
But you also pay attention to who is actually in the room.
When I asked whether kindness could replace rules altogether, the Mayor made one last distinction.
“You don’t have to be kind. But you have to be polite.”
Kindness can become emotional. Politeness can still contain a firm no.
Perhaps that was enough for Monster Café.
Ten monsters arriving at once did not require a magnificent new philosophy of queue management. Kevin’s tentacles did not require an international convention. Dracula’s tomato juice did not need a tribunal.
You need enough rules to stop the place descending into chaos, enough flexibility to avoid becoming ridiculous, and enough judgment to know the difference.
Somebody will still jump the queue. Somebody will still find a loophole. And somebody will eventually have to decide who gets the chair.
Which brings us rather inconveniently back to my usual answer.
It depends.
In The Next Issue
Whose Rules Are These Anyway?
Have you ever stopped in the middle of your day, looked around, and wondered: Wait… who actually made this rule, and why am I obeying it?
One minute you are carefully balancing your coffee cup, dodging invisible office politics, and remembering not to leave your shoes in the doorway. The next minute, you’re wondering why families have unwritten holiday protocols, why friends have completely different communication codes, and why you feel guilty for breaking a standard that nobody ever actually wrote down in the first place.
Who writes these invisible guidebooks anyway? Is it society? Is it our parents? Or did we all just collectively agree on a bunch of arbitrary customs one Tuesday afternoon and forget to tell anyone?
Join us next week in Issue 35 as we ask the burning question: Whose Rules Are These Anyway?
Join us next week:
Monday With Frank & Ralf – 8:00 CEST With Frank, Ismar & Ritesh – 15:00 CEST With Janita, Frank & Fabrice – 17:00 CEST
Wednesday With Frank, Martin & Manfred – 7:30 CEST With Janita & Sylvie – 15:00 CEST
Thursday With Frank and Bruce 10 CEST With Janita, Rosii & Frank, perhaps Monika & Nathalie – 11:30 CEST With Janita & Babette – 13:00 CEST
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