WHERE EGOS DARE

Bert, or Baron Heinrich von Fuchs-Langezeit zu Neanderthal to give him his full honours, is not one to hide his light under a buschel. Sorry, bushel. Not for him the role of the caring nobleman disguising himself as a peasant, the better to understand the suffering of his subjects. Bert operates more along the lines of Ludwig II, the extravagant 18th century King of Bavaria. He puts the manic in Germanic. He turns arrogance into an art form. He is L’Oréal Man (“Because I’m verse it!”). He could almost be French.

At the moment he is ordering me about like Captain Von Trapp with Julie Andrews. Honestly, I think he thinks I work for him. Fetch this, do that, unzip the other. “Listen, Schatzi, I’m not your secretary,” I said to him the other day. “If you want to send me some flowers, you have to phone the florist yourself.”

I have compared him on occasion to a number of Teutonic megalomaniacs, from Attila the Hun to General von Klinckerhoffen, with touches of Michael Schumacher here and there (at traffic lights, for example). He does everything with an irritating perfectionism. He has the precision of Jürgen Klinsmann, the determination of Boris Becker, and the phone number of Claudia Schiffer’s hairdresser. He is even vaguely related to the British Royal Family, his ancestry being situated on the outer reaches of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line. He is 1,976th in line to the throne, or thereabouts. He keeps an ermine robe in his wardrobe, just in case.

I found the following extracts in my favourite book which could have been written about Bert.

“ … adventurer, ex-hippy, good timer (crook? Quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch …”

“… he had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him – everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it.”

This is from the late Douglas Adams’ seminal meisterwerk “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. This book is far more than a comic science-fiction story. There are some universal truths in it that will be handed down to future generations alongside Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Such as the answer to the question about Life, The Universe and Everything being “42”. It’s blindingly obvious when you think about it. And a timeless piece of good advice: “Don’t Panic”. It’s as good as the Bible. (If you are Zed’s born-again nutter, don’t bother sending in a great lecture about blasphemy, the Bishop is a very good friend of mine and approves all my posts before they go up).

On my last re-reading, the scales fell from my eyes, and I realized that Bert was the embodiment of one of the key characters in THHGTTG. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Zaphod von Beeblebrox. Minus the second head and the third arm, of course, but otherwise his Westphalian alter ego.

With the emphasis on the Ego.