There can’t be many German phrases which lodge easily in the adolescent Australian psyche. Even kids who aspire to one day drive an Audi wouldn’t put Vorsprung durch Technik stickers on their surfboards. And even the most politically insensitive nerd probably wouldn’t put an Arbeit macht frei sticker on his laptop. But the Australian swimmer Kyle Chalmers was 23 when he got the words Nur die starken überleben tattooed across his chest in Gothic Fraktur extra bold. And since German was, apparently, his favourite subject at school, we can be sure he knows what it means. Which, of course, can’t be said of most TV audiences in what used to be called the British Commonwealth. So when they watched Chalmers ascend the winners podium again and again in Glasgow, each time spreading his arms like Christ the Redeemer to acknowledge the applause, they couldn’t be expected to know, without recourse to Google Translate, that the mantra which has impelled Chalmers to such astonishing success is the belief that ‘Only the strong survive’. A belief which could hardly be said to dovetail seamlessly with the Commonwealth Games Federation motto ‘Humanity, Equality and Destiny’. So far, the Federation has refrained from comment, but it would be interesting to canvass opinion about Chalmers’ Teutonic tag amongst his less muscular female fellow Dolphins – not to mention the Australian para-sportsmen and women who competed alongside them. Let’s hope Chalmers does not become the world’s first athlete to have his medals removed after failing a DEI test. And on the upside, it is more than two years before the next Olympics. Plenty of time for him to shave a few hundredths of a second off his lap times. And plenty of time for him to have that tattoo lasered off his chest, or to have the words Die Sanftmütigen werden das Erdreich besitzen inked across his back.

Tattoos are like Maccas Mega Meals; most people only get them after drinking heavily, and almost everyone regrets it the following morning. The main difference being, that far from being relieved by a few trips to the bathroom, tattoo buyers’ remorse can – and usually does – last a lifetime. But pointing this out to your kids may not deter them. Now that so few of the athletes and entertainers who really influence them are tattoo free, most parental attempts to stem the ink tide are Canutian. You won’t get much traction, either, asking them why, if tattoo acquisition isn’t consistent with a low IQ, don’t more Nobel laureates get them? To date, only three are known to have submitted to the needle: Winston Churchill, Ardem Patapoutian and Elie Wiesel. Churchill had a ship’s anchor tattooed on his arm as a naval officer thirty years before he won the literature prize; Papoutian’s tattoo was a diagram of the Piezo1 Ion Channel whose discovery won him the 2021 Physiology and Medicine prize; and Wiesel’s tattoo can hardly said to be a happy souvenir, since it was the number allotted to him by SS officers on his arrival at Auschwitz.

As a general rule, the percentage of a soccer player’s skin covered with tattoos is directly proportional to his salary. The exception to this rule, which was established by the fabulously wealthy and densely illustrated David Beckham, is the brilliant Portuguese striker Cristiano Ronaldo. I used to assume that this was just vanity – that he would no more let anyone write on his perfect body than blacken his perfect teeth. But apparently the main reason Ronaldo has never had a tattoo is that getting it would clash with his blood donor commitments.

(I was going to end the previous paragraph with the sentence ‘That’s impressive’. But then I read the latest coverage of the Alan Jones trial.)

Writing about the German language reminds me of an incident I failed to learn from. Early in my marriage, living in the leafy suburb of Woollahra, my daily commute took me past the Sydney branch of the Goethe Institute, the German cultural outreach organisation. Above a list of upcoming events on a wall outside, for a long time, was a big headline inviting passers-by to LEARN GERMAN NOW. So one night I went out with a black Texta and added the words ZAT IS AN ORDER! The only person who didn’t find this funny was my ex-wife. Since she subsequently failed to see the funny side of so many things I did and said, I suppose this reaction was also writing on the wall.