Today I received a new issue of the London Review of Books in the mail, which is bad news as I hadn’t even started the previous one yet. Hiding from my children for a few minutes I found a review of two books about drug use during wars, with (amongst its revelations) the fact that methamphetamine was marketed in chocolates to housewives in pre-war Germany. Those zany, ripped-to-the-tits hausfraus…
The kids were easy to subdue tonight because they’d both forgotten to nap for more than 20 minutes today. Maybe if they had been members of the Wehrmacht and issued with a ration of speed, they’d have been able to keep going for longer … hang on, where am I going with this? Perhaps I could send them off on a hunt for the genius in our building with SS decals on his Fiat Cinquecento. What sort of mug gets a car from the wrong Axis power to show his allegiance? Or maybe it’s just that all Europeans look the same?
Ahem. Today, pretty uneventful. Tired from the running, not reading enough of my ridiculous Bond novel, up in six hours for a run, and then it’s the first day back for La Serpiente at school. Fun times ahead.
2 responses to “Germans On Drugs”
I seem to remember you used to own a VW, a favourite brand of car for shouty people with moustaches and grand ambitions ..
I liked it so much I bought a second one after the first one got written off by a Czech lorry driver…
Apparently despite the name, the Volkswagen wasn’t the people’s car; the Nazis collected subscriptions from millions of Germans but put most of the money into buying armaments, and only a few top ranking Nazis got Beetles. The popularity after the war was because the Beetle had the same wheelbase as the Kubelwagen (German equivalent to a Jeep) so your average Fritz felt quite at home driving one around. Oh, and there was a hardpoint on the bonnet for a machine gun mount…