Thank you for your many kind comments on this eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time. There are sixty-nine others in our extensive archive.
Our seventieth is Jerome K Jerome's comic romp Three Men on the Bummel, now hurtling - or digressing - towards its thrilling finale. Tonight's episode includes this observation:
A thing that vexes much the high-class Anglo-Saxon soul is the earthly instinct prompting the German to fix a restaurant at the goal of every excursion. On mountain summit, in fairy glen, on lonely pass, by waterfall or winding stream, stands ever the busy Wirtschaft. How can one rhapsodise over a view when surrounded by beer-stained tables? How lose one's self in historical reverie amid the odour of roast veal and spinach?
One day, on elevating thoughts intent, we climbed through tangled woods.
"And at the top," said Harris, bitterly, as we paused to breathe a space and pull our belts a hole tighter, "there will be a gaudy restaurant, where people will be guzzling beefsteaks and plum tarts and drinking white wine."
That is broadly true in my experience of Germany, and is certainly not the case in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, although I would not be averse to climbing to the summit of Mount Moosilauke and finding a beer garden with waitresses in dirndls up there. If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club you can hear Part Eighteen of our serialisation of Three Men on the Bummek simply by clicking here and logging-in. All previous episodes can be found here.
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And do join me tomorrow for the nineteenth episode of Three Men on the Bummel.
