Discipline

Just for the record, 20 years ago today, Angie and I were in Paris in the morning and annoyingly for much of the rest of the day. We had taken a very early morning flight from Munich Airport to Paris. On the drive to the airport, there was a news item mentioning a bad car crash in Paris involving Lady Di. At Paris CDG, we quickly moved from the arrival terminal to our connecting flight's departure lounge. We were headed for San Francisco. I don't fully remember what if anything was announced about the tragic events, we were paying more attention to the ever-longer flight delay being announced. I think it was about 6 hours and thus when we finally got to SF it was long dark and we simply picked up the hire car and sought the hotel booked for that night and then "crashed out". In the days to follow we watched from afar on US TV how the British Monarchy came close to being made redundant.



Back then I was a "mild" Royalist and had certainly been a Lady Di admirer much of the time but I did understand where the Queen was coming from. She learnt her lesson, the British forgave her and Windsor plc flourished ever after. Her motivation to break with her duty?


I am nowadays still for the British Monarchy simply because it is possibly one of the most important income bringing assets to the UK economy. However, when it comes to running the country, I am now a Republican. Having said that I do have concerns about the Republicans in a former colony, forming a new Monarchy - The Trumps!.

Nuff said - evening dog walk took me through the village and another site of German discipline. Tomorrow is bin day, well "proper refuse" bin day. There are other days for the brown organic matter bins and the blue paper bins. You may well think that only one side of the street is collected but no, German discipline requires that on smaller streets, the occupants all put their bins on one side so that the refuse lorry doesn't have to turn around.

Seeing the lines of bins in the village doesn't help me to remember to put ours out. The rule is by 6:00 am in the morning. Firstly we are not included in the villages timetable but that of the 6km distant Ottobeuren and our bin is collected at 5:45. From the noise that is emitted when our bin contents hit the bottom of the metal refuse container, I am sure we are the first house on the list.