Extra, Extra!

I've been getting relatively consistent work as an extra recently. Here I am accoutred as a bell boy for a recent ad I was involved in for a budget supermarket.

Being an extra is not glamorous. Within the deeply hierarchical world of the media, you're not even on the bottom rung of the ladder: you are the rung itself, ignored and trodden underfoot. On my first shoot, which ran for 12 hours until 4 in the morning, we were first given some food around midnight. The extras drifted like pale ghosts around the dispassionate figure of our minder, who doled thin gruel out of a pot. Fights broke out over the small portion of stale cake we got to follow.

I expected that the pool of extras would be full of jobbing actors, students and hard-up foreigners. In fact, a large proportion of the people I meet are German pensioners, putting in a day's work to top up their income, or to stave off boredom. These oldies are always the most interesting people on set, and the Assistant Director's attempts to work them into the scene are brilliant.

The night shoot I did required a dance scene in a bar to be happening in the background. Not wanting to fill her trendy young bar too visibly with oldies, the AD put them at the back of the bar to dance, and for some reason consigned me to the same fate. So I spent a pleasant but surreal three hours faking dance moves in a group of septuagenarian women, who were doing their best to bump n' grind me.

"What time do you think we finish?" I whispered to one of them innocently.

"Young man," she said, laying her hand on the small of my back. "I'm old enough to be your grandmother."

With a firm touch that spoke of experience, she smacked me on the bum and shimmied off. Lost in translation again.

 

Nice Hair

Someone attached this to my bag today without me noticing. How did they know I was English?!

 

Volleyball

Someone asked me recently if I'd thought up a subject for my blog or whether I was going to jump from topic to topic. Reading over it again, I realised it seems to be an account of my abject incompetence or ritual humiliation at the hands of a ruthless German population.

I hesitated to make that the theme of my blog, as I assumed that as I settled in here, I'd move seamlessly from subjugation to triumph. However, seven weeks in, the experiences keep on coming.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been playing volleyball with my housemate and his Dad's friends. My experience of volleyball mainly consists of patting a deflated football back and forth over a saggy badminton net, but I decided it would be a good environment in which to improve my German.

I was relieved to find on arrival that his Dad's friends were exactly what I'd hoped for: a troupe of relaxed, forty-something men, mostly shorter than myself. When three bottles of cava came out before the game to celebrate a birthday, I was sure things were going to be ok.

"You'll pick the rules up as we go along," one of them said kindly, when I revealed myself as a beginner. "It's pretty easy."

As far as I can deduce from four hours of intensive volleyball, it is indeed a simple game with only one rule. Whatever I do is completely the opposite of what I should have done.

I cost my team dozens of points through serves that were too high or too low, through weak-wristed flaps at the ball and then through the inevitable blunderbuss punts into the ceiling that followed as I tried to correct myself. Every time a ball whipped over my shoulder and landed in a virgin unprotected area miles from where I was standing, I thought smugly to myself that at least someone else had messed up this time.

"Tom," one of them would say. "That was your ball."

The few points I did win were mainly though flailing a limb in the direction of the ball and making such an unorthodox connection that both my team and the opponents were completely befuddled and by chance the ball dropped on the right side of the net. I turned to one of my team-mates to celebrate.

"It's not just about winning the point," he said. "Sometimes it's nice to play well."

So what have I learned from my first seven weeks in Germany? That no matter how old you get, you're still not too old to make a fool of yourself. I probably could have worked that out in London.

 

Hummus

I've made a startling discovery which has led me to doubt my middle class credentials and question everything I hold sacred about the world.

I was invited to a dinner party the other day and I was told I didn't need to bring any food. I'm terrible at accepting people's hospitality without providing something in return, and so I decided to pick up some bread and dips as a delicious starter.

I reached the supermarket and was surprised to find not even a lack of a hummus section, but not a single solitary pot of the stuff anywhere. Now bear in mind that in the UK, or in London at least, any self-respecting Sainsbury's or Tesco Local is about 75% hummus, this was a bit of a shock to me.

In a hurry, I grabbed up a substitute that looked like that bloody amazing beetroot salad thing you can pick up in pots. The contents, I feel, say rather a lot about the German diet.

I mean, it's sort of a beetroot salad, right?