W H I T S TA B L E
THE WARM FRIDGE 1993. I had just left Vienna. A city clogged with so much culture it could pop anybody’s vein. Gracious Mozart parks, majestic buildings housing the Spanish riding school, gold clad monuments that thundered as relics from the Empires of the past. The home of the Wiener Schnitzel. And always a hint of east-meets-west with a tad bit of communist grandeur. I had packed my parent’s largest suitcase and was headed for university. Brown leathered and heavy as hell I headed to Canterbury to battle it out with the English tea drinking nation for my 3-year bachelors. I had barely settled in my student apartment. Small, quaint, and with a jolly large portion of “cheers” and other exaggerated superlatives. When, in those days – messages were still slipped under the door. It was an invitation to visit Marlene Friis in her respectable residence in Whitstable. The lady would cook up mussels for the occasion. I took the bus from the campus and arrived 25 minutes later at a sandy village. The main installation was the Indian restaurant on the high street,
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that counted 20 houses bunched together. The shock had nearly killed my parents when we a few weeks earlier had visited the restaurant and ordered “medium.” Just as we had figured out why there were napkins on the table the food was served. It became imminently clear how essential the napkins and the mango-lasse were to fight off the rain of sweat that appeared as flash floods with every new bite of the chicken masala. Otherwise the houses were colourful, with a sense of a mickey mouse appeal to them all. Without google maps, and with an exceptional amount of luck, I found the named residence and banged on the door from the top of the stairs. Voila, Marlene opened with her Mick Jagger smile. Autumn had settled in. The Kitchen and living room made up most of the space. Both of us were students, where the last pennies Marlene had scrapped together had gone for some wine to add taste to the mussels. She’d cut down on the heating budget to make ends meet. The steam from the pot moistened the whole apartment. As
the evening shadowed in, the coal fireplace was battling against the cold autumn night that was launching an all-out invasion in this -pre-worldwar-only-rentable-to-students -apartment. At one point we opened up the fridge for added warmth. We only had the light from the glow of the coal and a lonely candle by the kitchen stove (for added heat). The chatter that evening set the tone for the next three years. Reminiscing back to when Marlene had lost out, and with great disappointed, got disqualified from the 1991 World Pillow Fight Championship that was held at her parent’s place in the Vienna wine district. This was highly unfortunate, as we never got passed the qualifying rounds with me as the only contestant left. On my way home that evening, the stars twinkled over the windy roads back to Canterbury. It was the start of my student life and the beginning of Marlene’s continued adventures. God Bless Great Britain. Whitstable will remain but only as a sandy memory. – CHRISTIAN HERHEIM, BERGEN
