I love Germany. Every time I go there, I go home thinking that I should have been born German and that it was a travesty that I was born in bloody England. Germany is tidy, efficient and has rules which people follow. Germans wait for the green man at road crossing even when there is no traffic. They don’t drop litter. They don’t stand around in queues. They appreciate good music and are rewarded with good bands coming to pay them a visit. I still recall my shock and envy when visiting my friend in Frankfurt and discovering that the club she took me to was not open monthly or weekly like London’s desultory alternative nights, but every single day. So when I discovered Empathy Test were on tour but that I couldn’t make it to any of their UK dates, it didn’t seem much of a hardship to fly out to Hannover to see them. I picked this destination purely because it coincided with my weekend off, without knowing a single thing about Hannover or even being able to find it on a map. I did of course note that it had a very attractive parkrun.
As if to back up the point that there is something for alternative music lovers to do every single night in Germany, just as my plane was taking off I managed to find two tickets for the Neuroticfish gig on the Saturday night. This turned out to be a very good thing because truth be told, there isn’t an awful lot for winter tourists to do in Hannover. There is of course the infamous glass lift (so infamous that it prompted Isaac, the singer from Empathy Test, to digress into a lengthy tale about the lifts of Hannover mid-gig). There’s also a nice ornamental garden but it’s probably nicer when the fountain is switched on and it is bucketing hailstones. But nearly everything is closed on a Sunday and if you want an ATM or a vegan brotwurst you’ll be on a wild goose chase. It’s not really a tourist place, more a German place where people live Germanly and cleanly and orderly.
It probably won’t surprise you that Georgengarten, Hannover’s only parkrun, takes place in a perfectly manicured park and runs like clockwork. We seemed to be the only tourists, certainly the only English tourists, but were given a very warm welcome and explanation of the course in perfect English. I wished I could have spoken some German but I didn’t even learn at school, all the German I know is from listening to German industrial music so I can understand when people talk about pain and dancing and having a slug in your brain but can’t find my way to the station or order a slice of apple pie. The course was very easy to follow, well marked out with the usual yellow arrows and kilometre markers with marshals at strategic points to stop any stupid English people wandering off or falling in the pond. The first couple of km is down a dead-straight, dead-flat surface, which is a sort of compacted gravel so not that fast but not trip hazardy either. It is a very grand avenue with perfectly spaced very tall trees on each side and a view of a very impressive university building. When one reaches the park gates, there is a right turn which briefly takes you on to some pavement then back into another part of the park, which is more like the parks we are accustomed to in the UK with lots of puddles and ducks and general green stuff. Eventually you get to the finish where it seemed to be the done thing for the volunteers to shout “super” at all the finishers.
My time was 33:31 which wasn’t particularly fast for such a flat course but I blamed the Schmerz in my feet after too much Tanzen at Empathy Test.
7:07 