Nuts and Bolts: Verspätungsschal.

Claudia Weber works in a travel agent's office in Munich.

Unfortunately, her own attempts at travel were often sadly inadequate. Frau Weber's commute to work went wrong a lot - which, really, is enough to make a person wonder if he or she is in the right job.

So after a while Frau Weber decided to make a Verspätungsschal, a delay scarf, as a brilliant and original way of illustrating what was going wrong.

She knitted one row of the scarf for every journey she made to work. If her train was on time she knitted a blue line; she knitted a grey one if the train was five minutes late, pink for a half hour delay, and red if the train was even later than that.

For an entirely new way of communicating it didn't half strike a chord among German commuters, to the extent that when it was auctioned on ebay it made 7550 Euros for the charity Bahnhofsmission.

Here's the finished scarf, from a post about the auction on Twitter:



All hail Frau Weber, I say, for finding a truly universal language, and I hope she now feels quite happy in her profession.

Word To Use Today: Verspätungsschal. As in I'd make my own Verspätungsschal, except that I support Manchester City, perhaps.*

(By the way, as it happens Germany's railways, Deutsche Bahn, are state-owned.)

*Geddit? Manchester trains are famously late, and so the scarf would turn out mostly red, the colour of Manchester United.