Confessional

Posting this on 20th December 2018 as an attempt to make up for some of the shame of having forgotten my uncle Jochen's 79th birthday on Sunday 16th December. Two days before we had been at friends celebrating Angie's birthday and we even talked about him and I showed some photos of him. And yet on the day and until about 10 pm on Monday, I forgot and since then a combination of guilt and Brexit and other Angie family issues have prevented putting matters right.

So today I was determined to put matters right and arrange to have a beer put on the table of the pub he visits most mornings in Weinheim near Heidelberg. I checked on their website for the opening hours and saw it was 11:00 am. Then phoned cousin Katrin to find out how I might pay for it - she has been connected with the pub all her life and has earned a few Euros helping out there in her student days.

However, the bad news was that Jochen has a special agreement that he can go in around 10:00 am, have his tipple while he reviews the daily newspaper, checks up on the latest news about his once beloved Social Democrat (Labour) party. By 11:00 am he is winding his way home, working up an appetite for his wife Gerda's dream lunchtime cooking.

Katrin assured me he would forgive me and so I tried phoning home but he was either still winding his way home or tucking into lunch and didn't want to be disturbed - quite rightly.

The photo is at the moment the first one I can find of him and I. As I was born in September 1954 in the West Indies, it wasn't until the following year that I was taken to  Europe and got to meet my German family. In the photo left to right: my mother, grandmother Adele, me, Jochen and I suspect "Sepperl" the sausage dog - Granny had several Sepperls in her time. The photo was taken in the garden of her house where Jochen lives to this day.

In his younger working days, Jochen had a habit of going to the pub on Saturday mornings and on his way home for Adele's lunch, he would buy her a bunch of fresh flowers on the marketplace.

The pub and the marketplace have always been a focal point of his life - he loves his town even if much of the village type lifeblood has been knocked out of it by the massive expansion in recent decades. I have spent a few hours in the pub over the years. Lovely setting and highly recommended.

In later years as I went with my grandmother to Sunday Mass in the Roman Catholic St Laurentius church at the top of the marketplace, Jochen would wait for us at the pub there - he (his father) is Protestant!

PS I can't be sure of the exact date of the photo but have posted it to my mother's birthday which would have been her 28th and Jochen was 14. The difference in years between sister and brother was identical to the age difference between uncle and nephew.