Monday 14 January

Margot Von Carmen calls at the flat with some translation work – mainly divorce proceedings. I am sworn to secrecy, which seems a little unnecessary as I have little to no idea what I’m talking about. The more nuggets of English Margot digests the less able I am to leapfrog through the loopholes of my own mother tongue. Soon I expect Margot’s grasp of the language to surpass mine at a gallop, hollering choice Anglo-Saxon over its shapely shoulder, at which point I will retire to run a bar near the docks in Hamburg, communicating only with ‘Ja’, ‘Nein’, und ‘Unheimlich gut‘ when disingenuously describing the Jägermeister.