Acte 1 - Allemande

As they say in German, “Aller Anfang ist schwer” – to begin is difficult – but it’s not the beginning that is difficult, it is where to begin. So, perhaps it is best to begin at the beginning of this garden reverie ….

Breakfast choices

I have often maintained that you can tell where you are by the noise and smells around you. This time, you could be forgiven for thinking you were deep in a forest, not a city, Düsseldorf actually, where its normally restrained tempo is now punctuated by the shrill concert of out-of-tune chainsaws and the deep rumble of heavy vehicles. The air is redolent not of eau de diesel or filter coffee, but of freshly-sawn wood and dried leaves. A few days before our arrival, Hurricane Ela swept across the city, wreaking havoc and felling huge trees like dominoes, twisting them out of the ground like corks or snapping them off like celery stalks.

The House Elf cleans up

Despite the damage, and the consequent necessary shelving of our garden visiting plans, and despite the on-going construction in the city centre, Düsseldorf (and probably Germany) has changed little since last we visited. Things are still orderly – the baggage arrived agonisingly slowly but neatly spaced on the conveyor belt; there are still lots of obvious rules and regulations; the hotel rooms had a certain severity that was suggestive of the building’s former use as a children’s home and the dozens of spreads and jams in the breakfast room were all neatly lined up like soldiers with labels front and centre. The supermarkets still sell pre-composted vegetables, and clearly have deliveries just once a week – the shelves being somewhat empty by the end of the weekend. And everywhere there are sweets – on the counters, on the pillows, in the breakfast room and in their own large department in each tiny supermarket. While in a sporty mood thanks to the World Cup (of which I confess to having seen far too many matches …), the Germans have invented a new sport – Kassenstehen – standing in line at the cash register. They have solved the problem of poor service in their department stores in a single blow by now delivering no service at all and having only one register per floor …

Printen - Yum!

The trip to Germany was not just meant to be a garden reverie, but also a trip down memory lane for the Lairds and Laird-Wahs. And so it was that Estee has been introduced to the German afternoon tea, courtesy of friends, who provided an eye-popping spread of at least ten different kinds of cake; the German Konditerei, where huge, painstakingly-engineered cakes cut with mathematical precision awaited the results of our deliberations, before being ferried to our table together with the afore-mentioned filter coffee or the German version of an Italian latte macchiato, a tri-coloured flavourless creation in a tall glass beaker; the best gingerbread in Germany to be found at Nobis in Aachen (Why go to Aachen to see Charlemagne’s throne when you can go to eat Printen?) and from where we nearly didn’t return after one of those heart-stopping moments when we couldn’t get the van out of the underground carpark; and German beer – Dat lekkere dropke – Düsseldorf’s famous dark beer brewed by Uerige in the Altstadt, accompanied by sausage and bread, and where the glasses keep on magically coming until  you wave the unusually genial waiter away (His girth attested to the fact that he no doubt had a drop or two between trips to the tables).

Dat Lekere Droppke

Best beer and company

Aachen - Am Puppenbrunnen

And then there was a trip to Köln to the Chocolate Museum, with its running fountain of molten chocolate and a Sunday drive to Kaiserswerth to the Rheinfähre -the ferry across the Rhine near where we used to live, where, after a quick stroll along the river, we repaired to the adjoining café with a large beer garden under magnificent horse chestnut trees, where we found ourselves supping on beer and matjes (fresh herring) and Sachertorte at 10.30 in the morning, much to the amusement of the waiter, who was still serving Sunday breakfast elsewhere.

And finally a trip to Holland to visit the Kröller Müller Museum, which purports to have the biggest collection of van Gogh’s outside of Amsterdam (although rather annoyingly only a few were on display), and which sits inside a national park, De Hoge Veluwe, an ancient sea, where it feels somewhat bizarre to be driving through with forest on the one hand and heathland with sand dunes still visible on the other. The wild nature of the park is in strong contrast to the obsessively neat fields and villages around it, with their brick (!) roads and where each strictly geometric brick house sits neatly on its little plot with a carefully organised and ordered garden in front. Needless to say there were many gardens sporting arresting arrangements in Dutch box. We also noted with interest that in contrast to Germany, there was no advertising for beer or cigarettes, there were no pubs, only the occasional restaurant and most of the traffic was on two wheels. I am always utterly amazed how different things can be just across the border …

And so – onwards to Paris ….

Latte - just not as we know it!

Bis bald,

Su

Breaking the diet