Zwillingsbruder

25Oct07

Ok, had a nap and back on some kind of form. Had a few thoughts about yesterday. Spent a while handing out flyers of me, another in a growing list of strange experiences. Flyering is never the best job at the best of times. Not a great success rate. In order to get anyone to take anything I seem to feel this need to look overly earnest. I’m not quite sure what happens to my face when I plummet into this role, but I end up feeling numb in my forehead, and then faintly nauseous… And this was compunded by the fact that I didn’t actually really feel like discussing the idea any more. I think each idea has a finite amount of times it can be explained before it evaporates.

So I developed this technique where I would make sure the target person was walking towards me, I’d execute the delivery of the flyer (earnest face) and then hotfoot it off (opposite of earnest face) body tensed for a cry of recogntion. Really quite a stressful experience, and, needless to say, made me think again about why I was engaged in this whole thing. Although, whilst in the back of mind is the insistent thought that I am soon going to be punched in the face, the people that stop generally dig the idea.

So here are the two mayors. Aren’t they great. So full of bonhomie, it was unreal. Actually, although I started off the whole ‘window unveiling ceremony’ sulking in the corner like a twat I ended up being quite won over by the whole thing. The Oxford Mayor even did his speech in German (he’s obviously learned it especially) which I thought was a nice touch. And, having heard that there was some insiduous sub plot to the history of town twinning (whose substance I can’t even remember) I ended up thinking that the whole thing was quite endearing. Imagine a room full of old Oxford dears, and friendly German anglophiles, all dosed up on prosecco and bucks fizz at 10 in the morning… there was a lot of beaming going on.

This is a photo from the Oxford Bonn handbook from a similar event in the 70’s. By the looks of things they might have had the prosecco treatment at that meeting… (check the british teeth btw). The guy in the middle is Alan Pope, and he was at this meeting too. Bit of a legend actually. I think he’s got wise to something with this town twinning game. Sod art, I’m going into local politics… No, I’m not.

Had a brief heart flutter when I got a text asking if i was looking for my zwillingsbruder (twin brother). But it turned out that it was just someone trying to clarify what my mission was. A couple of missed calls and two sightings of identical twins, and thats about my day. Oh, a brief visit to the arithmeum, a museum of calculators (from abacus to silicon) was really fantastic. If ever in Bonn..

Tonight I’ll make a last ditch attempt and put up some A4 posters, and tomorrow I will leave. I have to admit I am a little dissappointed.. If this was really a story it would have some kind of endpunkt, finale, conclusion. Well, its not over yet I suppose. And also it’s not really a story, or not entirely. The one doppelganger who is friendly and not wary, is a girl called Britta and she even sent me her photo. Unfortunately she does not really look like me. Thanks anyway ‘tho.

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