I was standing on Frankfurt Griesheim station this morning, when I caught sight of a very attractive young woman. Reddish brown hair, smartly dressed and in a conversation with a blonde female friend who had a lot to say in very fluent German, even if she could not completely disguise her Eastern European origins.
The repressed ageing wolf in me was almost tempted to walk up to the young lady and comment in the best Scottish accent that I could muster:
"As fair art thou, my bonny lass".
Classic chat-up line? Not exactly. Even if she could speak excellent English, this is Germany, and she would have probably no clue what I was talking about ..... Waste of time given the age difference it would have been anyway, but I have to grow old disgracefully, don't I?
No? OK .... I did say "repressed wolf"!
So "as fair art thou, my bonny lass"? I am sure that I have also heard that incorrectly once as "as fair as thou, my ain true love".
Anyway it comes for those who do not know (cultural ignoramuses) from Robert Burns's poem "My love is like a red, red rose" - not the way that he spelt it incidentally.
I have been reading quite a bit of Burns's poetry recently. Wonderfully romantic stuff much of it is. Try his "Highland Mary" for starters. There is much in Burns's work that will awaken the romantic in all of us.
Not that his lifestyle quite reflected that. As a young man, at least, he was regarded as dissolute, a ladies man par excellence.
He was also what American conservatives call a "liberal" or more probably a ******* liberal! A man who appreciated and suffered along with the common man (realise that Burns could read and write in an era when those skills were limited to the select few).
That he had financial difficulties and eventually succumbed to heart disease (at the tender age of 37) puts him all the more in the "man after my own heart" category. I can empathise with him all the more in this knowledge.
Given my knack for ridiculous juxtaposition, I tried relocating him in time to the dreadful Thatcher years in the UK in the 1980s.
Here was a man who spoke English with a distinct regional accent (when Cockney and Home Counties English were seen as the only deviations from "Oxford English" that anyone was allowed to use, the rest were incorrectly indicative of ignorant lower class hoi paloi), who was concerned with the common man (rather than the banker and the speculator, the "alleged" heroes (!!!) of the Thatcher years), who did not live anywhere near London, nor probably wanted to (heathen!). And the tabloid press would have hammered him for his womanising!
Definitely someone I can come to admire more and more by the second, now I come to think about it!
Meanwhile where the young lady with the reddish-brown hair disappeared to this morning? I will never know. My still very lovable wife meanwhile is reverting from her usual very romantic anti-sexual self again and shouting as ever very unromantically into the 'phone, and I am musing upon Burns's not very romantic (but maybe highly enjoyable) follow-ups to his fascinating poetic chat lines.
"As fair art thou, my bonny lass ...."? Yes, I shall sadly spend most of the day wondering where that young lady went. Old repressed dissolute wolves have amazing difficulty coping with ageing and perpetual disappointments.
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