Haven’t been consuming a whole lot of meat or alcohol lately, so when we visited friends this weekend, and ate really, really good Japanese barbecue (he is Japanese, and the best cook I know) and drank Budweiser (from Budweis, he buys his beer across the border in the Czech Republic) and wine (he has some righteous wines), I got really sleepy. So much for conversation.

Which was just as well, because I sometimes have a bad time understanding them, as they mix English, German and Japanese when they speak (not such a problem on its own, we do that too) but the style of communication is one that takes time to adjust to; I don’t want to seem ungrateful, it’s just that a fundamentally different conversational strategy from ours seems to underpin their communication. Then, when we were all sitting outside enjoying the food, their neighbor the stammering computer programmer visited. I’d spoken to him on the telephone once, a five minute call about computer problems I was having; the call took half an hour to complete. I stammer too, sometimes, when under stress etc., but wow. He turns out to be young and good-looking, so my wife was flirting with him somewhat, which didn’t help with the stammer at all.

I was still sleepy driving home the next day, but luckily didn’t pile the Dobl