Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

 

Oh dear, I’ve only recently started posting on this platform and I’m already about to stray near the edge of political correctness.

Because, as we reclined round the pool of our rather lovely hotel in Croatia this summer, my children started trying to identify different nationalities without recourse to hearing them speak. My son proposed that all Germans wore moustaches. I replied, entirely accurately, that the women didn’t. My daughter suggested the Italians had the deepest tans – just as my half-Italian wife started applying Sunblock.

Evening fell, people drifted from the pool and the beer started flowing.  I found myself in conversation with a German called Lutz (no, he didn’t have a moustache). Lutz told me this was his first holiday in four years. His catering business had struggled to survive the recession and he was now worried about a double dip.

He blamed the Euro. “How can we have one economic policy across so many diverse cultures?”

He pointed towards the sun, setting lazily over the Adriatic, and proposed that it is impossible to work in 35 degrees of heat with the same intensity as in a more temperate climate.

The next day seemed to prove his point. It teemed with rain and all the suntanned Italians and moustachioed Germans were now indoors, busily tapping laptops and making vital business calls.

The same bar, a few nights later, and I found myself chatting to the waiter. He covered a dozen busy tables and this conversation was a brief respite for him. I said I’d seen him serving at breakfast that morning, and working in the pizza parlour at lunch. He told me he caught the 5.30am boat to the hotel each day and left after midnight.

So maybe the work/climate theory was not the entire answer.

At this point Lutz sat down to join us. He was wearing an Albert Einstein t-shirt. My son was quick to dig me in the ribs.