F February is scroll time. Outside, all spirit has long been frozen; only the mole sings his sad song and tirelessly puts heap upon heap. For consolation, our loved one and I wanted to go to the North Sea, but unfortunately we couldn’t find them in the fog. We stopped just beforehand at the “Hotel zur Nordsee”, which showed us how Schleswig-Holsteiners deal with their visitors: with mountains of food to compensate for the extremely flat land. So off through the ham waves over the cheese dike to the Rote-Grütte-Priel, then briefly freezing in the fog and finally sinking into the hotel room and scrolling to yourself.
Then an ad pops up in front of me on the display: “Susanne, find someone who likes you just the way you are!” Hmm. Do they want to get me a dog? This is contradicted by the fact that the ad shows a young woman grinning broadly at me, whom I immediately dislike. But she doesn’t care about me either, I can see that!
And even a dog might think, well, I’m not allowed to bite, but if my mistress says “Well, sweetheart” again, I won’t guarantee anything. Which is why I won’t have a dog in the future and have to live with the fact that those around me like some things about me and not others. Maybe she would like my dog, but it’s not worth it.
I, on the other hand, like a lot of things, for example the drill worker’s monument in my district town of Celle. Not everyone loves him as he is, namely naked, decorated only with a helmet and work boots. How oil drilling workers were just walking around – since they were working underground in the heat near Celle, they actually didn’t have much on.
Now the monument stands in front of the new building of the Catholic elementary school or the school was stupidly recently built in front of the monument, which has shown a man including his muscular backside and his crown jewels without objection for over 25 years and clearly has older rights.
The city council faction “Illiterates for Monument Removal” – or whatever the acronym currently means – is now demanding that the statue be moved in the name of child protection. The poor little ones have to pass a naked bronze man every day! On their smartphones, however, they probably only see dressed-up dogs that like them just the way they are.
The Caroline Mathilde monument nearby with a naked and a half-dressed woman along with two equally naked brats, on the other hand, is apparently okay for the guardians of popular sentiment. Of course the naked woman is not Caroline Mathilde – lover of the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Friedrich Struensee, exiled to Celle – only the urn is dedicated to her, the women around her are more of an allegorical sort.
In 1784, when it was commissioned, nothing was found. And there is no record of children having their eyes closed here in the past 240 years.