Ring a ding ding

 

Let me tell you about my only trip to Germany. In 2004, my sister and I went on a coach trip to the Christmas fair in Cologne. We spent longer on the bus than at the destination, but it was all we could afford (story of my life). My sister insisted we both take travel sickness tablets as she gets bad motion sickness.  I’m not sure why I had to take the pills too, but my sister is not a woman you argue with. There was an overnight stop on the outskirts of Belgium and a further two-hour coach journey next morning. Due to the tendency of travel sickness pills to make you sleepy, we both overslept and missed breakfast, and then we found we couldn’t stay awake on the coach. I mean, we just couldn’t stay awake. It was as if we’d been shot with tranquiliser darts. To make it worse, for this final stretch of the journey, we were sitting on the very front seat, close to the driver and the spare driver. We tried to take it in turns to sleep, but neither of us could keep our eyes open and we ended up jerking awake in Cologne in a pool of our own dribble, with the driver and the spare driver laughing their heads off because we’d been snoring most of the way.

 

Anyway, after this ignominious start, we disembarked and the cold air soon woke us up. I got into a ludicrous tussle with a middle-aged German man whom I thought was trying to steal my shoulder bag but it turned out he was trying to instruct me to wear the strap bandolier-style in order to prevent my bag being snatched. This was my introduction to the German tendency to interfere for the good of others, a trait I find intellectually laudable but in reality, speaking as an English layabout, a bit alarming. A friend of mine lived in Germany for a year and her landlady once rang her at work to ask her to come home and rearrange the washing she had put on the line to dry. My friend refused and when she got home the landlady had rearranged all my friend’s wet clothes so they were now ordered by category, size and colour.

What struck my sister and myself most was how physically large and healthy-looking the Germans were. They all looked like Olympic athletes. They seemed like giants to us, though it might have been another side effect of the travel sickness pills.

Anyway, the main thing I want to say here is that we were both mightily impressed by the Christmas Fair. This was in the days before such fairs became so ubiquitous in Britain that you can’t visit a large British town or city between November and January without emerging covered in fairy-lights and tinsel. And even now, the Cologne Christmas Fair was the best I’ve ever experienced. For one thing, it went on for what seemed liked miles. Round every corner, a new stretch of colourful wooden huts would appear, like in the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation which appears to increase in size as you walk round it. Everywhere you turned, you’d see new delights: a huge ice-skating rink, street performers, an oompah band, carol-singers, stalls selling bratwurst and huge cauldrons full of deliciously fattening potato-y concoctions. We drank so much gluhwein we almost missed the bus back home (I still have two gluhwein mugs in my cupboard), and we travelled for ten hours on the homeward journey with our purchases packed around us like polystyrene peanuts.

But it was the quality of everything that blew my mind, particularly on the stalls selling German goods. The marzipan didn’t taste like playdough but instead as if it should be called ‘marchpane’ and served on a golden platter to the queen. Christmas tree ornaments in wood and metal that were genuine works of art. Intricate puzzles and clever handmade toys, clockwork that actually worked, glittering tealights and handmade chocolates that tasted of actual chocolate rather than fat and sugar.

This very short experience of Germanic excellence has coloured my view of German craftsmanship ever since. Our Bosch fridge-freezer was bought in 2001 and is the most reliable thing I’ve ever bought – we now have a Bosch washing machine and a Bosch oven. So, after some deliberation, I decided to get my wedding rings from a German company. We’d originally liked the old-film fantasy of wandering into an upmarket jewellery store, where an eccentric but romantic sales assistant would smile benignly at our poverty and give us a good deal on a special ring. But then I realised that, even if such things ever did happen in real life, they didn’t happen to people our age who don’t look like Robert Redford and Jane Fonda at the height of their physical perfection. When you’re middle-aged, being a bit poor seems like failure rather than the charming temporary Bohemian poverty of youth. And if you’re short and dumpy, you just never get treated like Audrey Hepburn, something I’ve regretfully had to accept over the years! The reality of such a visit to a real-life jewellery store would be that, through subtle methods like not actually putting prices on individual rings and employing ever-so-slightly-slightly snooty staff, we’d be made to feel like over-reaching paupers. And I have eczema and my hands often look like they belong to someone who’s been gutting fish on a Grimsby dockside for thirty years, so I’m not keen to try on rings in front of a perfectly manicured young shop assistant. Also, we’d have to wear masks so there’d be the chance we would mishear the prices quoted, which might lead to embarrassment.

               ‘That ring is mumble-mumble-mumble.’

               ‘Oh, a hundred and fifty pounds? We’ll take it.’

               ‘No, I said one thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds.’

               ‘Oh.’                    

                                                                                       

  

So, we chose an online German company, though I was slightly worried that Brexit would lead to problems (it didn’t). They sent us, free, a device to measure our fingers which arrived only two days after I’d asked for it. I mean, during the pandemic, I’ve sent letters, first class, to friends in the next town up the motorway which have taken a fortnight to get there! We had to make compromises, of course, but at least we didn’t have to do this in front of a condescending sales assistant. I wanted 18ct white gold rings in a modern style, maybe studded with diamonds, but we ended up with the substantially cheaper 14ct yellow gold traditional plain bands, though mine has a minuscule diamond in it just so we know which is which. Inscriptions on the rings were free. One ring has ‘Grow old along with me’ inscribed in it, and the other has ‘The best is yet to be’, two lines from a Browning poem. We constructed our rings using their easy-to-use online tool which allowed us to choose material, thickness, style, decorative flourishes, size, etc and gave us very clear prices for every choice we considered.

I did have a brief patch of doubt about spending what for us is a substantial amount of money on two small items that might get lost in the post, and I emailed the company to ask whether we’d be refunded if the rings failed to arrive; I got a reassuring reply the same afternoon in perfect English.

The rings arrived on the middle day of the three the company specified, at the reasonable time of eleven o’clock, and the delivery man knocked on our door THREE TIMES!  I mean, when does this ever happen? I don’t know about you, but I usually arrive at the door breathless, pulling up my knickers or trying to flatten down my bed hair, to see the delivery van vanishing over the hill and my goods resting the wrong way up on my doorstep. I’d been worried that the rings would be different from what we expected when they arrived – we’d open the packaging to find we’d been sent chrome curtain rings or the inscriptions would be two lines from ‘Humpty Dumpty’. But the rings are precisely what we ordered and fit perfectly. And they were expertly packaged in an appropriately sized box (I once received a paperback book from Amazon which arrived inside a cardboard box big enough to fit my four-year-old nephew inside).

I wish the Germans could just arrange the entire wedding, frankly.

I showed the rings to my now-seven-year-old nephew yesterday. He twisted them round in his grubby fingers for a while, peering at them critically. I asked if he would consider being a ‘ring-bearer’ at the wedding. He asked for details of what exactly his duties would be. I explained, as I retrieved partner’s ring from down the back of the settee, that he’d have to hold the rings in their box until called upon to hand them over.

               ‘You’d be responsible for keeping them safe,’ explained partner, as I fished my ring out of the box of toy cars where it had fallen when nephew momentarily lost interest.

               ‘You don’t have to decide now,’ I told nephew. ‘The wedding isn’t until December.’

               ‘Will I be eight by then?’

               ‘No, but you’ll be nearly eight.’

He looked dubious, as if him being eight was a deal-breaker.

As I wiped the melted chocolate from his fingers off both rings and replaced them in their box, he gave a shrug and grudgingly said he’d think about it.

It’s the best we could hope for, really…