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.