GOULASH SOUP

I tend to associate goulash soup with skiing holidays. At the top of the mountain you find one of those little restaurants, serving a small range of things for lunch. A bowl of goulash soup and a beer, and you are all set for the afternoon's exertions.

The other association is with Basel. I had it when I visited my son last spring, also at the top of a mountain (albeit without snow). So when I went to pick him up over the weekend, it was the obvious choice for lunch on Saturday. I had it in a Raststätte on the A5, somewhere in the hills between Kassel and Frankfurt. And as with the skiing holiday, it was the perfect pick-me-up to see me through the afternoon.

2280km from Denmark to Basel and back in two days is a bit of a slog; I felt a bit like one of those Le Mans drivers by the time I got back this evening. I had borrowed my mother-in-law's car, since I didn't trust mine to last the distance, and my wife's doesn't have enough room for all of my son's stuff. Getting on the wrong side of my mother-in-law is not a sensible policy, so I decided not to thrash it, keeping to a maximum of 110 km/hour, even though it would take more hours. There is no speed limit in parts of Germany, so I was continually overtaken by people going nearly twice as fast as that.

Despite being the last weekend before Christmas, there wasn't too much traffic. I only had one bout of Stau, after an accident just north of Frankfurt on the way home. Otherwise, it was relatively painless. The car's headlight bulbs conked out somewhere around Hannover, so I had to drive the last 300km in the dark with the headlights on full beam. That managed to irritate quite a lot of German and Danish drivers, and it will probably irritate my mother-in-law when I get around to telling her. Still, it could have been a lot worse.

Walter Blotscher