Doing it sexy

I was prepared for many obstacles to my making a go of it here in Berlin to present themselves. I was sure, for example, that my lack of regard for the rules of German grammar would eventually catch me out in some way. I thought it was possible that my range of vocabulary would be too limited for me to hold down a job. I was prepared for everybody to want to speak to me in English, meaning I failed to learn as much German as I wanted to.

In fact, the main impediment to my progress at the moment is something so familiar to me that being reminded of it's presence is like being reunited with that teddy bear you spent your life carrying around as a toddler: comforting, if somewhat embarrassing. I'm talking about my incurable, incapacitating clumsiness.

On reflection, I think having been sacked from my bar job may have something to do with them having found the elephant's graveyard of broken bottles and glasses I'd secreted beneath the bar. When I totted up my breakages from overzealous washing up and badly filling fridges so that they became booby traps of falling bottles, and added onto it the amount of beer I'd either spilt or knocked over during my time, I calculated that they probably made a loss on me over my four shifts. And they didn't even pay me for two of them.

Today, I was photographed in a casting for an online advert for a beer company. The brief was that I needed to be able to open a bottle of beer with a lighter. The first couple of takes went well, and then the lady running the audition stepped up the level of complexity. I needed to walk forward holding two bottles, one in each hand. Then I needed to move them into the same hand, and open one with a lighter.

"And this time, do it a bit charming," she said. "You know: sexy."

Suddenly faced with all of these different tasks to think about, I lost all use of basic motor functions. My legs were like Inspector Gadget's giant telescopic appendages, and I was holding what felt like about twenty different bottles of beer in my hands, which were suddenly those massive foam fists they used to wave about on Gladiators. I wrenched away at the top of one of the bottles, and it exploded into the air, the lid knocking into the camera stand as a sticky spray of warm lager covered me and the floor. I leered at the camera.

"That was sweet," said the lady maternally, giving me a look somewhere in between pity and amusement that my incorrigible clumsiness always seems to invite. "We'll call you, ok?"