The best thing about spending a few days at home are the small details of comfort I encounter. I used to take these details of comfort for granted until, pretending I was grown-up, I decided to move out into the big wide world. Living in my own in a flat, with limited space and resources, has taught me many lessons. I now hugely appreciate opening a fridge filled with everything I could possibly dream of eating at any hour of the day. I love tumbling out of bed in the morning able to immediately sit down at a table filled with the most delicious and breakfastable foods on earth. Eggs boiled to drippy perfection, freshly baked dark German bread, flaky buttermilk and hams that have never seen the inside of a laminated package. Heaven!

The other thing I love about coming home is seeing Maria, our maid. She is the master of ceremonies juggling both the whims and the madness whilst always in a good mood. One of her many talents is packing and unpacking. She separates each layer of clothing with thin sheets of silk paper. The clothes are so neatly folded that she could easily get half a cupboard into a tiny little carry-on. Of course the trouble is that no matter how hard I try I can never get that mountain back into the carry-on afterwards. She irons as though she is on the ironing Olympics team and she gets any stain out of any item of clothing. Can you imagine anyone better to have around? I certainly can’t. She is also an excellent cook, possessing the incredible ability to cook both rich gourmet cuisine as well as lean health freak food.  So all in all coming home brings many amenities.

Coming home however also brings quite a few challenges. Now please don’t get me wrong I do love my family (and now a word you should never use) but uniting us all in one home is tricky. Regardless of the size of the home by the way, it seems to be a question of too many alpha males (and females) competing for pole position on centre stage. Or as my editorial director Nick would say, there are simply too many “big picture people.” In a way my family behaves very similarly to the FQR gang at one of our (dare I say dreaded) editorial meetings. My mother is a combination of our proprietor Charles and Nick, being both dominating and always wanting to feel in control. The family concoction only really becomes poisonous when someone is feeding the fire and in many cases this someone is me. You would think that I might have learnt to avoid the pitfalls by now. Well, I haven’t.  It’s quite easy really – just shut up and agree.

The occasion for my visit home was the opening of the annual festival – the so called Schlossfestspiele, which take place in the courtyard of our house every summer. Although both line-up and organisation are in the hands of an outside company my mother takes charge of the promotional aspect of it. This is not really very difficult for her since my mother enjoys quite a bit of attention in Germany. Her vivacious temperament tends to attract attention anywhere in the world but in Germany she is a celebrity. In fact it is quite unusual coming home and not  finding an entire camera crew, a journalist or even a biographer following her around.

Watching her is comical actually. She is as comfortable in front of the camera as she is off camera. Her conduct is always utterly unpredictable. She might suddenly grab one of us kids by the arm pull us towards her and hug and kiss us thereby shrieking at the top of her lungs whilst a photographer is trying to take our picture. Equally she might be in her The General shoes and scold me for not having brushed my hair. Her openness often causes quite a bit of media havoc. Don’t forget that German’s, especially journalists, often are not exactly open-minded. Quite the opposite, anything outside the norm is frowned upon. I know you should never generalise but what can I say this is my experience. Really it’s terribly boring. Recently a newspaper reported on another one of my mother’s “breeches of conduct” calling her “Princess Gaga.” Fabulous!

The opening night of the festival is sort of a micro version of Cannes in terms of blood thirsty press. The main difference is that our festival of course attracts far less high profile celebrities. My golden rule is;  if the cameras are swamping us then no one else swamp-worthy is probably around. It all seems quite absurd. I mean what are they after? They line up in front of us tackling each other in order to get our attention and the best shot. Like buffalos ready to attack they yell at us all at once “look here, over here, to the left”  “no look here, to the right.” Jesus guys, can you make up your minds, please?

So the grand opening was Aida, Verdi’s bombastic opera set in Egypt. The whether forecast said, to expect a storm of the century torrential rains and all. Of course this is not exactly convenient at the premier of an open air festival. We were lucky however, it was cold and windy but dry for most part. As the opera drew closer to the end and the plot dramatized the wind began picking up and we felt a few rain drops here and there. The whether began matching the tension on stage, Aida sunken in the arms of her lover the violent wind pressing them even closer together. And then the heaven opened up and a waterfall came pouring down. Everyone was already neatly wrapped up in plastic rain capes but even these could not keep the water out. When we finally caved in and ran into the house I felt a little sorry for Aida and Amonasro after all they saw us dash off,  leaving the front row a little deserted. I was wet, very cold and starving and therefore quite relieved we were able to head to the tent in the park where dinner and drinks were awaiting us.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Princess Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.